He’s the novel’s narrator, and he engages our sympathies with a poignant self-portrait of a sensitive boy who lost his mother at age 12 and was brutally bullied by his brother and their father, who is now recently deceased. “We both pretended not to hear his words,” Saul tells us. His subsequent exchange with the driver immediately establishes that each has a different version of what happened, and Levy expertly plants another clue to the many disruptions that will follow: “a small, flat, rectangular object” lying in the road that suddenly emits a man’s angry voice. Saul jumps back to avoid an oncoming car and falls on his hip. The year is 1988, and Saul is about to spend two weeks doing research in the German Democratic Republic Jennifer intends the photo as a gift for his East German translator’s Beatles-obsessed sister. He is Saul Adler, a historian specializing in communist Eastern Europe, and he is there to meet his girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, a photographer who wants to emulate the Beatles’ famous “Abbey Road” album cover with Saul in it. Levy opens with a characteristically striking visual image: a man stepping into the zebra crossing on London’s Abbey Road as a car approaches. “The Man Who Saw Everything” is a brilliantly constructed jigsaw puzzle of meaning that will leave readers wondering how much they can ever truly know. Ī time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing.Elliptical, elusive and endlessly stimulating, Deborah Levy’s new novel, her third to be nominated for the Booker Prize, packs an astonishing amount into 200 pages. Until, in 2016, Saul attempts to cross the Abbey Road again. He carries this photo with him to East Berlin: a fragment of the present, an anchor to the West.īut in the GDR he finds himself troubled by time - stalked by the spectres of history, slipping in and out of a future that does not yet exist. Apparently fine, he gets up and poses for a photograph taken by his girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. In 1988, Saul Adler is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2019Īn ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of 20th century Europe The Times
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