The Man Who Saw Everything

By: Deborah Levy

Narrated by: George Blagden

Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

An electrifying and audacious novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness by Deborah Levy, two-time Man Booker Prize finalist.

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life--and this story of good intentions and reckless actions.

The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries--feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present--to reveal the full spectrum of our world.

©2019 Deborah Levy (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

"A Rubik's cube of a book...[r]ipe and rich...[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." (The Independent)

"Electrifying...the novel explores both what we see and what we miss until the past and present are staring directly at us." (The Sunday Times)

“[Levy] loves to yank at our wiring, our orienting premises and prejudices . . . Her prose is light-handed and leaves a pleasant sting . . . Her rich, obsessional body of work is consumed by questions of how scripts—of gender, nationality, identity—paper over how fundamentally, how painfully, unknowable we are to ourselves, and the catastrophes that this blindness sets in motion.” (The New York Times)