One of those lovely books that starts as one thing, and turns into quite another. When Saul Adler is knocked down by a car on the zebra crossing at Abbey Road in 1988, it's the start of a chain of events which leads him to the GDR and a new lover. What's less clear is how he knows that the Wall will soon come down, and what happens in Eastern Europe thereafter. Some beautfully subtle hints are scattered through the first part of this novel which reveals its plot like the peeling of an onion. It's about youthful idealism, dreams of the future and of the past. What's art? Who owns beauty? How do global politics influence our behaviour and our options time and again? What's left when we look back at the past and the decisions we made when we knew no better what might lie ahead? Clever and erudite.

I thoroughly enjoyed this meandering historical fiction of two halves. The novel opens when Saul Adler is hit by a car in 1988. A Jewish historian, he goes on to break up with his girlfriend and head to Berlin where he falls deeply in love. Back in current time, Saul Adler is again hit by a car at the same, infamous Abbey Road crossing. This time, he appears to be hospitalised, and the slow unfurling of his memories, stitched together however authentically, are genuine magic to read.

Better than I expected although it took a while for it to gell with me considering it is quite short .

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy brings us full circle in pondering the political and personal walls we construct, and invites us to separate our perceived truth from reality.

After her memoir The Cost of Living, fans of Deborah Levy may have speculated what direction her next novel might take. She hinted at a move away from the “phantom of femininity” to “find new main characters with other talents.” Despite a male protagonist at the helm in The Man Who Saw Everything, the stance of women in society still claims its stake. But the state of our global politics and obsession with self are both under intense scrutiny.

The Man Who Saw Everything yields a voice and writing style unique to its author. Fusing a soon to be united and soon to be divided Europe, characters span the Berlin Wall and Brexit eras. Cleverly constructed, both past and present are relayed in the present tense.

‘What was I aiming for? What did I want? What did I deserve?’
The book opens in 1988 with young historian Saul Adler aiming to cross Abbey Road in a state of self-indulgence to replicate The Beatles album cover. However, as he steps onto the famous zebra crossing he is knocked to the ground by a car. This same act is repeated some thirty years later. However, the time zone remains deliberately unclear to the reader until the author is ready to sharpen the focus.

‘Jennifer was always looking at me through the lens of her camera.’
Believing keen photographer Jennifer Moreau obsesses over his beauty, Saul visits her following the first accident for sex and sympathy. As he sits licking his wounds he asks for her hand in marriage. Jennifer immediately steps into her own power and discards him. Wielding her sexual ylang-ylang scent she is a welcome contrast from the women Stalin flirts with by flicking table bread at them. With Saul’s ego bruised, much like his hip following the accident (as he continues to remind us), he travels to East Germany to research communism for a paper and consequently invites a love interest in the form of translator, Walter Müller.

“It’s like this, Saul Adler: the main subject is not always you.”
Upon rearranging the letters of Saul Adler’s name we realise that the tone has always been set. The Sad Allure of a burdened narcissist on a quest to quench his thirst drinking from the cup of others. His obsession with self screams from the page. Although the book title describes him as all-seeing, he is not listening to the needs of others. His continual expression conveys his own humiliation, neglect, abuse. Lunging from sadness to relief mid paragraph, his narcissistic perceptions are overpowering. His intense blue eyes and irresistible torso charm others until they discard him, as he sees it, inexplicably.

‘I was to live with my father and brother without my mother, who had used her body like a human wall to protect me from them.’
Perhaps the root source of Saul’s psychological trauma was losing his mother to a car accident when he was young. Clinging to the vivid memory of his mother, the string of pearls which belonged to her cling to his neck. (As a side note, the author herself wore pearls daily until the string snapped during a minor debate so it is interesting a set should end up here). Adrift from society, yet unwilling to return to a motherless home, Saul seems incapable of loving or living without sorrow. As a result these pearls are of great significance to him.

‘Surveillance was the air everyone breathed.’
Despite the communist regime, bisexuality and beauty prevail in Saul’s world: Eyes, lips, a seductive laugh. While the communists are watching the tyrants treading the soil of East Germany, Saul is himself busy: Viewing how his own reflection bleeds into him and considering how others view him.

Perhaps by surveying the world through the eyes of a narcissist the author is asking us to question the current global climate. The unrest which resides. The walls and borders ever deeper. Perhaps she is asking us to stop looking within and to look with’out’. To take an interest in something other than self. To think beyond the beauty of the rose to how the garden needs to be tended.

‘Attention, Saul Adler. Attention! Look to the left and to the right, cross the road and get to the other side.’
Just as Sofia in Deborah Levy’s Booker nominated Hot Milk was vague about what she wanted to see, so too is Saul Adler. He suggests his desire to cross the road is to bridge a linear connection with something bigger than himself. But he masks his true desire: To carelessly play with others, observe them quiver at his behest, whatever the cost.

With complex layering and time slip motif, Levy’s eighth novel is as much a demanding read as it is demanding. Provocative and unflinching the book requires an adjustment of our own lens to separate our perception of what is real and imagined. She is urging us to view the spectre hidden within our inner and outer worlds and seek a truth which unifies not divides us.

A deserved contender for the Booker Prize longlist.
Thank you Penguin Random House and Netgalley for the proof.

This didn't really work for me. Much too tricksy and needed far too much of my attention which is in short supply at the moment.

An anti-communist Jewish man is hit by a car while crossing the road just before he goes to East Germany to research communism. Not knowing who to trust, the story evolves like a dream sequence, as gradually we come to know the man and the stories behind the crash.

This is unlike anything I’ve read before. I absolutely loved Levy’s first novel, Hot Milk, and her writing is an absolute delight for fans of good literature. I would have had this as a Booker Prize finalist, for sure. This book has a Paul Auster feel about it and is fascinating and poignant in equal measure. Highly recommended.

Beautifully written, cleverly structured and bursting with intelligently explored themes, an English Literature degree student could unpack the delights within these pages for hours. But I came to it craving entertainment and a rip roaring story and I found both lacking here. The gorgeously constructed sentences left me cold in the main but there were moments of poignancy that I appreciated. It is very evidently quality literature but for me it was just the wrong book at the wrong time.

Really struggled to connect with this book which for me is suprising. Books which tackle binary notions of gender and sexuality are usually my thing but unfortunately the writing style didn't do it for me. Never the less I can appreciate that Levy is a talented writer - this book just wasn't for me.

Time, history, perception and the recreation of the Beatles' Abbey Road photograph,
A history student is on his way to East Berlin in the old communist state of East Germany in 1988 to bury the ashes of his father. Before he goes he poses for a picture for his artistic girlfriend on Abbey Road, the famous zebra crossing outside the recording studios used by the Beatles.

The story begins with an accident on Abbey Road, where the student is hit by a car. His injuries appear minor and he goes to East Germany anyway. He meets several people who have an impact on his life in one way or another. As the story unfolds, nobody or anything is as it seems. For quite a while the tale seems to ramble aimlessly. Until it slowly registers that some things do not make sense. At the end of the book a single event reveals why things have appeared not quite right, and by doing so, opens up a completely new perception.

A clever novel that requires observation and delicious thought a long time after the story is told. Intriguing, layered and a bit weird and longlisted for the Booker Prize, this work should have made the shortlist. Recommended.

I know this is a popular book and I’m fussy about what I read but found this difficult to get into. I will try again as I am a big fan if Levy’s

Queen Levy just keeps getting better. This one slips between the cracks of time pulling you in unexpected directions and piercing your heart. She is a fearless writer and one worth your time.

I can appreciate how cleverly and well written this book is but sadly I found it quite a difficult read. The juxtaposition between past and present is intriguing but somehow I just didn’t warm to the characters and consequently didn’t really care enough about what happened to them.

Hard to explain why I liked this book so much - it was quite disparate and non-linear and seemingly not really about much more than one man’s life and obsession with the GDR before the wall came down. But I found the structure fascinating, finding out bits about his life all in the wrong order, and his character was brilliantly drawn.

I downloaded this book because it was recommended by a friend. There is only one word I need to write - BRILLIANT.

Deborah Levy's novels always feel more French than English. They are clever and twisty, philosophical and seeming light but really quite serious. This one concerns a young man who has two accidents on the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing. Or does he? The novel splits and twists and turns through Eastern Germany and the UK with a protagonist who loves both men and women and seems to be in all time zones and eras at once. Always worth reading.

A new novel by Deborah Levy is something to celebrate such is the talent of this wonderful author. The Man Who Saw Everything was no exception and it wasn’t a surprise to see it make the Booker Longlist.

It was one of those novels you need to concentrate, to absorb the quality of the narrative, the characters and the subtle nuances of her themes.

Saul, damaged, confused, obsessed with the GDR, the communist tyrants that ruled the eastern bloc countries. His stay in East Germany was dark, stark, black and white with no colour, the only light the characters he met, the events that shaped the rest of his life. Levy gave us a real sense of the dark scrutiny and fear felt by its citizens, Saul pulled in, unwittingly wrapped into their lives for both good and bad.

Levy jumped forward, the Berlin Wall no more, the East’s inhabitants free of scrutiny, free to travel. It was the change in Saul that was the most profound, and utterly engrossing, his mind played tricks on him, the people from his past encroached on his present muddied his perceptions, his memory.

Levy made us question how we interpret the past, is what we see and remember the same as someone else, did events occur as we thought they did. Could we have made things up, seen and remembered only what we want to see, blinkered to the whole truth, the reality just as Saul appeared to be.

It was the way Levy was able to weave all those thoughts and questions into her narrative, yet still maintained the essence of a story, of characters that resonated, that were diverse and fascinating.

You could see Saul’s mind whirling round, the faces he saw blurred, interchangeable, the intervening years glimpsed through conversations tinged with anger, regret and most importantly a truth he perhaps did not want to face.

His relatives were cruelly pushed away, the doctors, nurses replaced for East German informers as he riled against them all in his tormented anguish.

It was a novel to savour, respect and admire, Levy proving her place at the forefront on the literary world.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019 and Short listed for the Goldsmith Prize 2019, this an engaging but thoroughly curious book told by the most unreliable narrator I can recall reading for a long time. The Man Who Saw Everything attempts to examine what we see and what we fail to see.

In 1988 Saul Adler (a young historian) is hit by a car on the Abbey Road in Liverpool. He is apparently fine; he gets up and goes to see his art student girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. They have sex then break up, but not before she has photographed Saul crossing the same Abbey Road.

Invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favourable essay about the German Democratic Republic. There he falls for the enigmatic Walter and they begin a brief relationship. He also spends a night with Walter's slightly crackers sister Luna. All before the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989.

To add to the layer of confusion the second part of the book is set in 2016 and Walter is in a hospital bed, having been struck by a vehicle on Abbey Road. He sees people from bygone days in his room and mixes up past events. The few friends and family who attend his bedside appear saddened by his shattered mental state and from it what life holds for him.

His memories are nebulous, fragmented, the past and future appear to be mingling and unreliable. Being narcissistic, he is quite unaware of how he is perceived, happy in his own view that is he is a good looking catch. Whilst self-absorbed & ego-centric, he is still a likeable & intriguing person, the bemusing aspect is intriguing and keeps you drawn in until the end. Left hanging you will need to make your own determination re the outcome.

This novel is written in two parts. In the first we meet the main character Saul Adler in his late teens and then again, in the second half of the novel, aged 56 and in hospital after being hit again by a car (mimicking the first time we meet him) and in a delirium. He confuses identifies and realities, and as a reader the missing years are filled in by returning characters from his earlier life.

The novel moves back and forth through time from London to East Berlin to Cape Cod and back to London capturing misunderstandings and misconnections between partners and family. It is equally a novel about an ever changing Europe haunted, as in the film Wings of Desire which is referenced throughout the novel, by our wish to be understood and to belong. This and other references (the ‘death’ of Paul McCartney implied by others in the Beatles last album ‘Abbey Road’) gives the novel a light haunted quality.

Nothing is certain for the characters and for the reader but we are not being deceived, this is the nature of remembering and loving which is beautifully captured and realised by an exceptional author.

I’m still not sure I quite understand what was going on in this but I found it really engrossing and incredibly descriptive. Might need to read again!

The Man Who Saw Everything is a beautifully written but hard to follow story. The first part of the story starts in 1988 but with the main character Saul having flashes of the future during his visit to the GDR for research. The second part is on the present with Saul having flashbacks to his time in the first part. The story seems to be about his many complex relationships with his family and various lovers throughout his life, the second part of the book delves deeper in to these and his story does become clearer but I was still left a little confused at the end.

I was given an advance copy of this book by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.