Ever the experimentalist, Levy has some fun with temporal boundaries here, but Saul’s beguiling voice and the pacy narrative make it a joy to read rather than a mere exercise in literary trickery. Saul’s viewpoint turns out to be something other than it seems, which makes for some heart-stopping moments of surprise ... The most interesting aspect of this highly readable double mirror of a novel is the way Levy uses sexuality to explore the nuances of human interaction. Saul is not your typical male lead: here is a boy wearing a pearl necklace because it was his late mother’s; a man who is picked up and thrown down by a woman who has power not only over his body, but his public image ... If he were a woman, we might barely notice the way he is constantly gaslighted and robbed of agency, but casting this innocent soul as male, the injustice of it feels rightly shocking ... Such a varied writer won’t please everyone all the time, but if you secretly felt that...any of her previous work was just too stickily, intensely weird, don’t give up. Because this one is brilliant in a new way: cool, calm, highly atmospheric...and an ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of 20th-century Europe.
With such playfully coiled sentences and sly conjunctions, Ms. Levy instantly reels us into Saul’s spacy consciousness. And for the course of this slim, oblique narrative, we remain ensnared in his thoughts, delighting in his dry perceptions ... The truth emerges incrementally as Ms. Levy, with exquisite precision, stitches in a clue here, another there, weaving together past and present—how we cannot see until she allows us to see—all the while suspending her characters in a preternaturally sharp present. Many scenes have the clarity of hallucination ... [a] distinctively intimate voice and elliptical perspective that quickly seduces and constantly surprises the reader. Her novels in particular are small masterworks of inlay, meticulously constructed. The Man Who Saw Everything is perhaps her cleverest. But cleverness for its own sake is clearly not what interests her. Being human does. That is mystery enough, she repeatedly proves, as she tantalizes us with connections and secrets that seem to hover at the edge of our vision. Few writers, for example, can summon sadness with such force ... These big ideas thud onto the page, like apples hitting the roof of that garden shed, but we hardly hear them. Deborah Levy makes us listen instead for the fragile rhythm of a breaking heart.
The Man Who Saw Everything is a gently ironic title. Yes, Saul sees everything — in part because he’s seen it all before — but he understands nothing. It’s a risky device, employing as first-person narrator an amnesiac narcissist, a narcissist moreover who isn’t even an outsize baddie but merely indifferent, self-pitying. The price is that the other characters in Levy’s novel remain figures from a Greek chorus whose chief function is to remind Saul, in vain, not to forget the canned pineapple or to look both ways before he crosses the street ... Deborah Levy, one of the most intellectually exciting writers in Britain today, has produced in this perplexing work a caustically funny exploration of history, perception, the nature of political tyranny and how lovers can simultaneously charm and erase each other.
[Levy's] prose is light-handed and leaves a pleasant sting ... it isn’t the grand reveal that feels like the novel’s achievement. It’s the evocation of a state of mind — of haziness and confusion that are, in fact, unwanted knowledge, what the characters have trained themselves not to notice let alone confront ... [Levy's] novels and memoirs are noirish, lean and intellectually chewy — good to glut on if only to marvel at her private mythography, how her obsessions crop up and combine in each book ... Levy likes lines that come undone, that double back on themselves to fray .
...[a] brave, terse, dense, plangent, unsettling novel ... The Man Who Saw Everything, though not obviously avant-garde, takes an unorthodox approach to plot, setting, the portrayal of consciousness and the wielding of ideas ... Levy’s project as a writer is itself about effacing borders – between the novel of ideas and the novel of sentiment, be-tween the schematic and the fluent, the inevitable and the accidental, the cerebral and immersive, the sensuous (or somatic) and cerebral, the parochial and otherworldly, metaphor and literalism. If this sounds vague, it should ... In The Man Who Saw Everything, the sense of things being mixed 'all up', or occurring 'at the same time', of clashing symbols and conflicting emotions, isn’t simply asserted or described. It is enacted – manifested in the novel’s form, embodied by its structure. And yet by refusing ever to make the significance of the story neat or wholly legible, Levy has succeeded in evoking our ways of engaging as they are experienced, as a kind of groping, with patterns only appearing to form, a final sense touched but never grasped. You would call her example inspiring if it weren’t clearly impossible to emulate.
Fitting together exactly what you’ve seen isn’t always easy in this greased Rubik’s cube of a book ... Levy...is writing with gorgeous, juicy assurance here. It’s stylish: written with a speedy, vivid economy, her characters’ eccentricities leaping off the page. It’s funny: Saul’s narcissistic narration is full of deadpan details of youthful pretentiousness, social awkwardness. It’s sexy: Levy writes keenly about layered attraction and resentment, how her characters bestow and withdraw gifts of sex and affection. And it’s political: the novel exposes the hypocrisies that accompany rigid ideology, but also questions how an individual can live with integrity if they only live for themselves. There’s also all sorts of other stuff going on in the first half, however – stuff that it’s basically impossible to get a handle on ... It’s only towards the end of The Man Who Saw Everything, when many different memories come clearly into view, that we see all of [Saul's] carelessness and selfishness, and all the ways his careless and selfish choices have impacted on other people. It is only when we see Saul through the eyes of others – through a different lens, if you like – that we finally see everything.
... a work of philosophy and art ... examines how our perception alters the very little we actually do observe and how our recollections, as time and space elapse, are more about personal narrative than reality. Its disjointed recapitulation of details is a circular, labyrinthian puzzle, taking the reader deeper each time without giving absolute clarity ... Complex in theme and symbol, this story packs an entire world—in fact, different versions of this world—into 200 pages ... The author accomplishes this through incisive use of sensory detail, creating a multi-dark-and-light-layered cake of a sort, in which each layer is a different rendering of one life's most defining moments ... Most will appreciate Levy's subtle management of metaphor and theme: how life reflects art, and art, life; how time changes our experience, our memory, our history—whether personal or political, local or global. And how our perceptions, often blocked by roads and walls, are the key to connecting it all, connecting us all ... Each novel Man Booker finalist Deborah Levy writes comes nearer perfection. Reread The Man Who Saw Everything for the deep pleasure of it, but also to savor each scene's multiple meanings.
Reading Deborah Levy’s latest novel – longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize – is a strange, unsettling experience that grows increasingly surreal as the story unfolds, like sleepwalking into someone else’s dream ... The result is disorienting, with a political power that emerges as if through smoke ... Levy writes with such poetic economy that characterisation is sometimes sacrificed for the beauty of the sentence, but some of those sentences are so moving that they stop the reader on the page, inviting us to re-examine them, like sculptures, from every angle.
The same is true of the whole: the book is so original and the words carry such force that it pulls us along to the end, leaving us wondering whether to start all over again to fully appreciate its craft. In her exploration of censorship, racism, the prohibition of desire and the limits of language, it is what Levy doesn’t say that infuses the text with such emotional resonance ... No word is wasted in this mysterious, magnificent work.
... a sometimes-confusing narrative that involves a man who actually sees nothing clearly ... Levy writes slim books that, per ounce, pack a surprising caloric density — like pine nuts ... I am loath to write about the second half of this novel lest I spoil its carefully calibrated revelations. Suffice it to say that Levy brilliantly clarifies why the book takes us back to East Germany on the cusp of its dissolution. She also satisfyingly reveals what all those earlier confusing inconsistencies were about ... Levy's writing is playful, smart, and full of memorable lines ... This is a novel we learn to read as we proceed.
Deborah Levy’s exquisite new novel The Man Who Saw Everything – her seventh, and her third in a row to be nominated for the Booker prize – both unmasks and confronts [the] convenient denial of individual culpability ... Saul’s life, we come to understand, functions as a kind of psychoanalytic mirror of Europe, with events in the material world finding their emotional counterparts in his disordered memories ... Towards the end of the book, when Saul attends an exhibition of...photographic work, he thinks: 'There is a spectre inside every photograph.' The spectre, of course, is the subject: Saul himself. Levy’s singular achievement in this novel is that it is not simply these spectres that shapeshift. Saul’s entire emotional and psychological topography is unstable, questionable, and within that fluid context, everything has the power to haunt ... Levy’s writing is, no doubt, deeply attuned to human anguish and loss, but her real talent is to remind us of fiction’s other great function: the loosening of boundaries ... Perhaps, Levy seems to be saying, we have gone about things in the wrong way. Instead of resisting cruelty and injustice at a national or global level, it’s possible that each of us might need to endure the same process of disassembling as Saul, so that we can see, as in the clear light cast by this novel, the awful power we have over others, the unthinking emotional destruction we are capable of wreaking, the regimes we not only suffer under, but enforce.
Elliptical, elusive and endlessly stimulating ... packs an astonishing amount into 200 pages ... a brilliantly constructed jigsaw puzzle of meaning that will leave readers wondering how much they can ever truly know.
This is an ambitious book that creates more questions than it answers. Levy doesn’t patronise her readers and she is able to pull off such scope because of her humour and ability to evoke a mood.There are lyrical passages about lake swimming, cold white wine and pasta restaurants in Soho alongside intense psychological probing of childhood, parental duty and sexual attraction. It’s clever, raw, and it doesn’t play by any rules.
... an evocative journey across a shape-shifting personal and political landscape. As Levy peels back each new layer of this at-times enigmatic story, there are new pleasures disclosed at every turn ... Levy expertly navigates the complicated geometry of these relationships, all of them shadowed by the menace of the Stasi in the regime’s dying days ... In scenes that slip effortlessly into Saul’s dreams, hallucinations or episodes of pure memory, Levy excavates bits of his painful emotional life and casts a fresh light on some of the novel’s earlier events. Despite the occasional elusiveness of this technique, Levy’s storytelling is grounded in direct prose and vivid images ... both intensely personal and fully cognizant of how the events of a rapidly changing world can alter lives in unexpected ways. Levy’s ability to keep these elements in balance with subtlety and assurance is a testament to her considerable artistic skill.
As the title ironically implies, this is a book about seeing and being seen; about who does the looking and how our gaze is always selective. Eyes and lenses are recurring motifs ... Levy handles her weighty themes in this slim novel with a lightness of touch and a painfully sharp sense of what it means to look back on a life and construct a coherent whole from its fragments. The Man Who Saw Everything has already been longlisted for the Booker prize; a third shortlisting for Levy would be well deserved.
... the author’s pacing is nearer the movement of thought than a received idea of the structure of a novel. Levy sometimes dispenses with scene setting or context (one chapter is simply three sentences). She breaks rules (the book is told in the third person, but opens with a paragraph in the first person). She’s sometimes plainspoken, but in other moments indulges in linguistic flights of fancy. Levy is confident, both in her abilities and her reader’s intelligence. It’s bracing, almost shocking ... For me, metafictional ploys usually grate. But Levy is such a good writer, such a weird writer, that she more than pulls off what would feel, in lesser hands, like a gimmick. It’s never clear how to reconcile the book’s first half with its latter, and this ends up being what makes the book so charming ... Levy repeats phrases or images or motifs often enough that the reader wants them to mean something. And perhaps they do! You’re so busy trying to make meaning of the small stuff—isn’t that what reading is?—that you’re less concerned whether the book fits together tidily, as most of us expect novels to ... It’s a strange book, and Levy concludes it on a note that’s downright baffling—yet somehow quite apt. Many novels fray or indeed unravel altogether at their ends. Levy gleefully tugs at hers, pulling it apart, but somehow it still holds.
Figuring out what the hell is going on within the fluid worlds of Levy’s fiction is not always straightforward. While other authors are increasingly drawn to autofiction, for Levy, uncertain times, it seems, call for uncertain realities. The characters in The Man Who Saw Everything shape-shift, and time bends back and then twists upon itself again. Objects and animals — wolves and jaguars; sunflowers and cherry trees; a string of pearls and a toy train — echo throughout like leitmotifs. It may be best not to try to pry apart the seams and just enjoy looping the loop along Levy’s carefully crafted Möbius strip.
... explores uncanny terrain but never leaves the real world. What begins as a straightforward yarn about a vain academic becomes a complex portrait of a man who begins to wonder about his own identity ... Not by accident does Levy place her characters in Soviet-era Berlin, the famous divided city. As her protagonist struggles with his confusing 'double life,' her supporting characters lead similarly bifurcated existences. Outwardly respectful of the oppressive state, they’re rebellious in private. With the lightest of touches, Levy ponders big questions about family, love, citizenship and mortality. The Man Who Saw Everything succeeds as both a book of ideas and a philosophical thriller, a brainy, brisk and mesmerizing novel.
Her third novel in seven years to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize, it confirms Levy’s rare—and ever more relevant—vision. In one short and sly book after another, she writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both. If the themes sound weighty, Levy’s elliptical fiction is the opposite, thanks in part to her wry appreciation of dramatic ironies at work ... The Man Who Saw Everything, Levy’s most stylistically complex novel yet...veers from concrete realism to a fractured blend of dream and memory ... The emotional charge of this novel builds slowly...subvert[ing] genre fiction in a darkly comic way ... Levy’s lonely, eccentric characters acquire an unexpectedly emblematic dimension as dispossessed wanderers, a tribe in which Adler now claims a place.
It’s a book that both demands the reader put its pieces together and makes sure that any perfect fit can never be found. It asks us to see everything in full: 1988 and 2016, London and East Berlin, a sense of history’s fundamental openness as well as its absolute determinism. And yet it makes sure that any such synoptic vision always slips and slides away ... Levy...is a master of the seemingly loose yet actually taut story. Here, beautiful, careless Saul drifts dream-like from one situation to another in a way that seems both accidental and inevitable ... Levy’s prose in The Man Who Saw Everything is controlled, refractive, sharply intelligent. There’s no wasted motion. Single sentences render character with the clarity, and cruelty, of a snapshot[.]
..intelligent and supple ... [The] emphasis on borders and the limiting of movement between countries resonates today, of course; the Brexit vote is mentioned later in the book. It also resounds in the potent metaphor of Saul’s struggle to cross Abbey Road, an image to which the author returns several times ... Levy performs intricate muddlings of time, character and place ... skilful, dizzying storytelling.
Levy is engaged in her own Duras-like technical experiments with time, and in her latest novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, has worked out how to ‘haul the past into the present tense without a single flashback’. In all her books the logic of the psyche – its fears and desires, fantasies and projections – trumps the more workaday narrative kind, but here what she has called ‘portals to the past’, and to the unconscious, have grown smaller and more slender such that they can appear in nearly every sentence without seeming to disturb the texture of daily living. Or rather, it’s the disturbances which make up that texture ... Levy ...conveys the way both the past and the future are constantly changing, the course of events predetermined only by our determination to repeat our errors. As she knows from Greek tragedy via psychoanalysis, what is not faced is what most powerfully recurs. Levy puts a characteristic twist on the kind of dramatic irony in which characters move towards a catastrophe they can’t foresee but the reader can: she shows how people avoid what they know about themselves ... The novel maps a self being pieced back together so that the weakest points show. It also addresses a moment in history that could feel like a bad dream or a bad joke, and Levy has always taken those seriously.
We are lucky to live in the world of Deborah Levy ... Like many great works looking at the mysteries of time, love, and history–the sociological imagination if you will–The Man Who Saw Everything explains so much, and hardly anything.
... the story of a man who has fallen apart, and it is laid out in a way that is artfully disjointed, so that in spite of the gaps and the unorthodox telling the result is coherent and rather beautiful ... this style has a quiet rhythm that soon becomes irresistible, and its deceptively simple phrasing often conceals tremendous force. There is lots of humour in Saul’s deadpan nonchalance and it delivers piercing jabs of clarity as certain pieces fall into place ... Most of all, though, Levy’s skilfulness with narrative proves why this is her third novel in a row on the Booker prize list. The fragmentary portrait coheres because, as they fill more of the frame, her disparate pieces are revealed to be ingeniously connected. And it moves you because, gradually, the developing picture exposes not only what Saul has temporarily forgotten but things he had disastrously always failed to see ... Reading this novel provides conclusive evidence that you are in the hands of a master ... don’t merely read this novel. Treat yourself and read it twice.
... provides a fascinating look at the way sentimentality persists across time ... Levy’s new novel is less bombastic than some of her earlier works; nonetheless, it’s another example of her measured interrogation of form and myth ... As Levy chronicles the sensations of newness and excitement that characterize any traditional bildungsroman, she captures the paradoxes of some enduring cliches ... The novel may seem rote. It isn’t. With dexterity and formal command in the second act – something akin to the great formal jumps of high modernism – Levy introduces an element of hyper reality that brings her characters’ thinking and experience into starker relief ... has a sense of scale ... This novel compliments Levy’s years of formal engagement. It’s resonant and true for the difficulties facing our modern era.
... stunning ... Deborah Levy achieves what other authors have attempted but few have realized ... What Levy has created is the fictional equivalent to the principle of theoretical physics that holds a particle can exist in two places at once ... may not be for everyone, especially those for whom the joys of linear narratives provide transportive escape from life’s cares. But for those who dare to step off the curb into the unfamiliar, Levy’s novel offers a panopticon of new realities.
Yes, Levy’s novel unfolds in a specific time and place with clear historical parameters. But she also undercuts the idea of plot (or at least its inevitability) by rendering Saul as self-absorbed and newly brittle, as if he had emerged from his accident in an alternate frame of mind ... What Levy is suggesting is that time is a construct, that it takes a disruption—an accident or a revolution—to stir us to consciousness ... The Man Who Saw Everything, then, offers a narrative of awakening, in which Saul, in his way, is reborn as an innocent, a naïf tracing and retracing his steps, his memories, through an elusive world ... less a journey of discovery, a bildungsroman, than its opposite: a saga of unraveling. And that, in turn, gives the book an understated power, as we confront a writer working against expectation to subvert the conventions of the novel, to rethink the form on her own terms ... It’s the questions, not the answers, that bring us most acutely to life.
With Levy, you are never quite sure of your footing. But she is ... In The Man Who Saw Everything, reality 'slips' quite literally. The oddities that accumulate in the novel’s first half gain clarity in the second ... The levity and mystery of the first half of the book give way to narrative-sapping backstory and wooden summaries ... information appears in clipped chapters, as if Levy is breathlessly trying to bring us up to speed. This results in mannered dialogue ... On the novel goes, between keenly observed scenes and more affected ones.
Reading Deborah Levy’s novels is a lesson in humility. She is a careful and intelligent writer with an absolute command of language, one who demands you not only to pay close attention, but also second-guess your immediate reactions and responses to her work. Her novels are deceptively slim in length, but supersized with profound ideas that defy preconceived notions and easy interpretations ... the best possible sort of challenge ... Saul is the most unreliable of narrators, and the reader will undoubtedly suffer moments of confusion. But Levy doesn’t leave us lost and wandering without a guide. We can examine the pieces and put them together — like Jennifer’s triptych — and finally understand that the man who saw everything truly saw nothing at all.
... may be catalysed by accidents, but there is nothing accidental about this fastidiously crafted (and crafty) novel. Saul’s story is laced with clues whose detection should be a source of conspiratorial pleasure. But Levy does not seem to trust that her meaning will be deciphered...There is scant space for the reader here. It is when the novel surrenders to its paradoxes that it beguiles.
The hallmark of a Levy novel is an all-encompassing mood that infuses every page regardless of whether it contains evocative lush imagery or deep psychological probing – both elements are integrated seamlessly into one compelling voice that draws the reader in ... Once again, Levy has developed a narrative that scrutinises the interior world of her characters with laser-like precision and revealed it to us with subtle, grand design. If at times it becomes difficult to follow, that is precisely the point. Who can narrate their history with reliable memory? How can we trust any singular version of history? ... Levy’s prose is electrifying on the micro level and profound on the macro level; the novel bends time, subverts our expectations, and exposes blind spots with her usual sophisticated artistry. The questions it raises percolates long after the last page – how our carelessness will prove criminal to ourselves, how imperative it is that we confront our historical narratives and interrogate our sense of truth, the extent to which our futures are already written in the past. Levy throws balls in the air and steps aside to see how or if we can catch them; that is one of the great strengths of this novel but it is also the element that may frustrate readers who crave definitive answers.
Booker Prize–finalist Levy...explores the fragile connections and often vast chasms between self and others in this playful, destabilizing, and consistently surprising novel ... The novel’s first half may read like a fairly conventional portrait of a narcissistic young man intent on sabotaging his romantic relationships, but the second half is both impressionistic and profound, interrogating divisions between East and West, past and present, fact and fiction, and even life and death ... Levy’s novel brilliantly explores the parallels between personal and political history, and prompts questions about how one sees oneself—and what others see.
In a relatively short book, Levy spins an extraordinary web of connection, a dreamscape in which plangent images like a pearl necklace, a spilled drink, or the petals of a tree recur like soft chimes. What is past, what is to come, and what is real are all for the reader to discover alongside the character of Saul himself, 'a man in pieces' ... Head-spinning and playful yet translucent, Levy’s writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry.
Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel.
