The Man Who Saw Everything

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy is a very smart book about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly.A man in London attempts to cross Abbey Lane (where the Beatles’ iconic picture was taken in 1969). It is 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he cross again in 2016 (Brexit). In East Germany a woman is obsessed by the Beatles. This story slips and slides between time, countries, ways of seeing. Things are fragmented. In order to cross the road that he’s been trying to traverse for 30 years, Saul will not only have to look both ways, but outside of himself. Otherwise, he is destined to remain a man in pieces, and lonely in space-time continua.The story feels like the lyrics of the song Penny Lane where the character is looking back, in and out and through his life littered with people, friends, lovers, experiences. It’s hard for him to make sense of it all — a fugue, a narcotic haze?I loved the continuous references to the Beatles and their songs and how Abbey Road is linked to the story, how the crossing is made or not.There is a sharp sense of what it means to look back on a life and construct a coherent whole from its fragments.

I am on page 150. I keep checking the reviews for encouragement to plow on. It is sort of interesting, I really want to care, I am a little curious how this will finish and what was the point?... but I am giving up. Too many other books to read and this one just is not drawing me in. Disjointed. I think if I never hear from these characters again it may be too soon. Sorry, I wish I could be more positive. Just not my tin of pineapple. I am the woman who sees nothing here.

Sometimes the repetition made me feel as lost as the main character in the book. The overall flavour was futility. I didn’t find anything in it that was joyful.

That's about all there is to say: a pretentious wreck.

Somewhere very early in this book, I started feeling a really powerful connection to the writing and story. This is the first book by Deborah Levy I’ve read, so I can’t say if they’re all like this, but the voice of this book was a voice I could feel in my blood. It’s exactly what I’m looking for in a book of fiction, but so rarely find. The characters are great, real characters, unique and alive feeling. The time period covered, 1988-2016, the layering of time, relationships, events, the complications, the drifting, the confusion, the depths. And as a lover of short books, that Levy was able to write such an emotionally involving, and historically interesting book, that’s only two hundred pages long, is a special part of the delight. A rare and intensely perfect novel.

The story never conveyed to me what was driving Saul emotionally. He was filled with a lot of regret the confusion, but I found the confusion frustrating and not particularly compelling.

The crosswalk with the zebra stripes. The car. The accident. The driver. The narrator. East London. East Germany. West Germany. A father and brother. A girlfriend with two female roommates. And a sauna. A translator. His mother and sister. And wife. And children. The reader, thanks to the narrator, comes to the crosswalk; visits East Germany; things happen; things don't happen; things might have happened, recently, in the past.

The jacket copy & reviews tend to describe the protagonist as 'narcissistic' which apparently is a polite yet inaccurate depiction of a young man who is decidedly feminine and not in a good way. Not blessed with a strong female personality, he's submissive, wears pearls, cries a lot. An androgynous character could be quite interesting, but I felt the author failed to make me care what happened to him next. I admit I gave up early on this one. It's a kind of bait and switch to ignore these pronounced gender issues in any discussion of this novel. They are clearly central to the story.

I love novels that play with the fluidity of time. McEwan's Child in Time is a favourite, Lorrie Moore's Anagrams another. This is a third. The way Levy plays with and explores time in this novel is its highpoint (along with her, as ever, rich sensory prose.) She tells, not the story, but the life of angelically beautiful Saul Adler, his past, present, future, alternative pasts and futures, roads not taken, accidentally taken (the novel hinges around him stepping out onto the Abbey Road zebra crossing, perhaps for a photo shoot) and deliberately taken. Time slides with a sumptuous fluidity in and out of the consequences of Saul's few actions in his troubled, pretty life, taking him to the GDR before the Berlin Wall came down, having him fall in love with his translator there, but sleep with the translator's sister. He lies in a coma in his fifties, but perhaps he has been in it since his twenties. Perhaps he never made it to East Germany.The novel has no plot, just as life has no plot, and that might irritate people looking for one, but it's refreshing if you are getting tired of over-engineered stories.Four stars not five because I found the voice too mannered at times - the endless 'It's like this, Saul Adler:'; 'It's like this Jennifer Moreau' was overly stylised and intrusive, making me aware of the writing when I wanted to stay inside the time-ripple worlds that Levy created. But overall, it was a delight.Recently I went to a talk by a Chinese author who explained there are no tenses in Chinese. Everything is present tense because that's all we have: whether we're experiencing what's happening, remembering what happened or imagining what will happen, we can only do this right now. English grammar with its very rigid tenses that lock time into categories makes it hard for us to imagine another way of experiencing time, and I think Levy has done a wonderful job of making this possible. I'd love to know how it would work translated into a language like Chinese - whether much of that nuance would be diluted.Overall - rich and refreshing and different.

I liked the writing of this novella initially. The longer it went on, the more I found myself resenting it and ultimately being repelled by it. By the time I stopped reading, halfway through, I couldn't read more than a page or two at a sitting. My ultimate feeling was that what Deborah Levy is trying to do here is in fundamental conflict with the novel form, and this should have been executed in a different medium. Whatever, it is a very, very unsuccessful book.

The second half of this novel is neither well enough conceived to sit with the first. There are so many better written novels that allow readers to consider unreliable narrators and this is a crude creative writing course level attempt. Deborah Levy readers deserve far better than this

Her books are fantastic. This one was terribly boring and often hard to follow.

Some thoughts on this book:It's too dense with symbols to know what 'really' going on.The only character I really liked or cared about was Luna, the "mad girl".I couldn't forgive Saul Adler for how he treated her.Is the GDR the Underworld? Is Luna Persephone or a Moon Goddess?I guess if Luna is moon Saul (Sol) is Sun. The Solar hero. He neglects to bring Her the right gift, but instead a narcissistic substitute(an image of himself rather than pineapple) He angrily destroys Her holy things(the Abbey Road lp). No wonder his life is blighted thereafter, that he meets his own destruction at the Abbey Road crossing (as cosmic symbol). Such are the Ways and Powers of the Goddess!Saul Adler wears pearls. Deborah Levy often wears pearls in photos.I'm glad Saul Adler found his fate.I didn't understand this novel, but I'll be thinking about it for quite a while.Update:If this novels meant to be "about masculinity" it's a total failure. Well, none of the male characters rang remotely true for me. They seemed like shallow irritating caricatures. (still, maybe that Is masculinity).The name Adler means Eagle, symbolising the all seeing eye, thus the novels title. In the book Walter is described as seeing everything. Perhaps the point is Saul sees the surface of everything but understands none of its significance?