(Thank you, Net Galley, for this advance copy)

“The Man Who Saw Everything” is my third book of Deborah Levy and though it has a similar formula of a setting in a foreign country focusing on emotions in relationship to the books I have previously read, “Swimming Home” and “Hot Milk," this book is quite engaging posing quite different questions, especially on memory, seeing and perception. 

The opening scene is simply amazing. Saul Adler, a historian on Eastern Europe, is almost hit by a car while waiting for her girlfriend Jennifer Morneau at the zebra crossing on London’s famous Abbey Road. Saul drops a pack of condoms while falling down. The driver Wolfgang, being defensive, narrates "his careful reconstruction of history, blatantly told in his favour." Then he reaches out his hand and touches Saul's hair, which Saul finds "strangely comforting." Wolfgang also has a rectangular object in his hand that speaks "Fuck off I hate you don’t come home" with a male voice. It is 1988.

This detailed opening scene is very absurd but quite revealing, casting doubts on the reliability of Saul's perception including his sexuality and memory. The unreliability of the first person narrative continues when he talks about what will happen to Germany to Walter and Luna who are living in a closed society where the surveillance is a norm.

We might wonder if Saul himself is constructing his own history in his favour or he cannot simply remember. The fact that his sexuality or even emotional attachment keeps shifting deepens confusion. Because of the confusion, the book requires quite an intensive reading, which I find enjoyable.

As a well-organized book, “The Man Who Saw Everything” is full of self-references repeated with some variations. Images of sunflowers, jaguars and tomatoes keep recurring.  The Beatles reference holds the book together with the theme song "Penny Lane" and three scenes at the zebra crossing (the start, the middle and the ending). 

In spite of the title, Saul himself is a horrible person in terms of seeing. He is rather a person to be seen with "intense black hair and even more intense blue eyes." Oddly Jennifer, the photographer, asked him never to describe her beauty as if preventing him from seeing. Once Jennifer questions him "It’s always about you, isn’t it?" Narcissistic Saul's slippage is quite entertaining, saying wrong things and forgetting the most important gift when travelling to East Germany. But the most grand slippage is his memory, which somehow is in pieces like a photograph of Jennifer named "A Man in Pieces". 

Somehow Saul manages to present himself as a son of an authoritarian father, a motherless child and a lover who is not given a chance to love his own child. In the other side, there is Walter in Eastern Europe, who is somehow mirroring Saul in a realistic way, the actual man who saw everything. 

The book is multi-layered and playful but I would say it is my favoutie book of Levy's so far.

Just not the book for me. <i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i> initially interested me, but its lack of emotional substance quickly put me off. I don't understand this book or its characters. The writing is offputting and a little absurd; the characters feel too much like characters. I've read books where I didn't mind--or even liked--both those things, but Levy's execution left a lot to be desired.

(3.5) It’s best to read this book cold, not primed by reviews that provide too much information about the plot, so I’m going to give only the barest of details. The narrative revolves around the apparently surpassingly beautiful and self-absorbed Saul Adler, a 28-year-old graduate student in history. As the novel opens, it is 1988, and he is preparing to travel to the German Democratic Republic to conduct research on the cultural opposition to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. However, he has a private research project closer to home about the psychology of male tyrants, and he is preoccupied with the totalitarian currents in his own family. He has strained relationships with his father, who has long been committed to the socialist cause, and his brother, Matthew, whom Saul describes as the preferred son, a “Bolshevik hero”, and a bully. 

Before he leaves London, Saul’s ambitious art-student/photographer girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, is scheduled to take a photograph of him at the famous zebra crossing on Abbey Road. Jennifer will attempt to replicate the iconic cover of the Beatles’ 1969 album in a photograph that will be presented as a gift to the Beatles-obsessed sister of Saul’s East German interpreter. We are told that while Saul waits on the famous street for Jennifer to arrive with her camera and gear, he is hit by a car. Although there’s some blood and bruising, his injuries are apparently minor. The photograph is taken, a parting amorous episode between Saul and Jennifer transpires, a marriage proposal is rejected, and Saul goes on his way to the German Democratic Republic, where he proceeds to fall in love with his interpreter.

The first half of Levy’s inventive and allusive novel reads rather strangely. Because of the novel’s epigraph—a quotation from Susan Sontag about the ways in which photography violates its human subjects, as it presents them as they never know and see themselves— and because Jennifer refers to Saul as her “muse” and forbids him to describe her physical beauty, I was under the impression that Levy was aiming to subvert stereotypes about women and art, in which the female is the object for the male creator to “symbolically possess”. Levy suggests that even though Saul and Jennifer are lovers, Jennifer isn’t interested in Saul as a person; his striking appearance is useful to her —a commodity to be exploited. In the end, though, this theme is a secondary one. Jennifer is not Levy’s main interest. Although important to the story, she’s not its focus. Instead, Saul’s curious, occasionally surreal experiences on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall take centre stage. There are odd, inexplicable elements to this part of the story, and Saul’s thinking and behaviour are often puzzling. He is paradoxically highly observant and peculiarly obtuse.

If the first half of the novel is a kind of rich but strange tapestry, the second half exposes how that material came to be woven. The narrative now becomes propulsive as the reader learns what the threads actually consist of and how they’ve been interlaced to create a particular, deceptive picture. The strangeness of the first half of the book becomes understandable. This makes for very satisfying reading, and I mostly admired Levy’s skill and cleverness. At the same time, I felt there was something lacking in her depiction of Saul’s psychology and conflicts. His strained relationships with his father and brother and an early, formative loss are not convincingly explained. Some of the dialogue is a bit too mannered, and there’s a slightly soap-opera-ish feel to this part of the book. For these reasons, I’ve rounded my rating down rather than up.

Thank you to Net Galley and Penguin Random House of Canada for providing me with a digital ARC of this book.