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The Man Who Saw Everything

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The Man Who Saw Everything

By: Deborah Levy
Narrated by: George Blagden
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About this listen

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019***

Brought to you by Penguin.


Electrifying and audacious, an unmissable new novel about old and new Europe, old and new love, from the twice-Man Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home

'The man who had nearly run me over had touched my hair, as if he were touching a statue or something without a heartbeat...'

In 1988 Saul Adler (a narcissistic, young historian) is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. 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.

Saul leaves to study in communist East Berlin, two months before the Wall comes down. There he will encounter - significantly - both his assigned translator and his translator's sister, who swears she has seen a jaguar prowling the city. He will fall in love and brood upon his difficult, authoritarian father. And he will befriend a hippy, Rainer, who may or may not be a Stasi agent, but will certainly return to haunt him in middle age.

Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levy's electrifying The Man Who Saw Everything examines what we see and what we fail to see, the grave crime of carelessness, the weight of history and our ruinous attempts to shrug it off.

'Levy writes on the high wire, unfalteringly' Marina Warner

Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Political Heartfelt

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Critic reviews

An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel... Its sheer technical bravura places it head and shoulder above pretty much everything else on the [Booker] longlist
Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page
A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing... Increasingly surreal and thoroughly gripping
Exquisite... A brilliant Booker nominee... Ultimately, Levy is concerned with power – the forms it takes in our lives, the extent to which it is something we both possess and are subjected to
One of the big stories in English fiction this decade has been the return and triumph of Deborah Levy... You would call her example inspiring if it weren't clearly impossible to emulate
An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe
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
Charged with themes spanning memory and mortality, beauty and time, it's as electrifying as it is mysterious
Intelligent and supple...a dizzying tale of life across time and borders
It's clever, raw and doesn't play by any rules
All stars
Most relevant
fast paced, but thought provoking. a beautiful exploration of the non-linearity of time. i highly recommend.

Beautiful exploration of the non-linearity of time

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Saul Adler flits between his time as young historian in London and East Berlin and the present day as he slowly succumbs to his injuries from an RTA. He tells of his loves, his losses and his regrets.

This is a beautifully written story, one that ranks in the top twenty of my favourites. It gets confusing near the end, possibly reflecting Adler's morphine induced confusion, but that slightly detracted, hence four rather than five stars.

A very emotional listen

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I couldn't stop listening. I enjoyed the history, the story of a troubled life, his beauty, his innocence, his distance all peppered with stolen lyrics. It's magical and still so real, morphine twisted and photographs in an exhibition.

Twisting, unfolding, lust and illusions.

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This is such a moving story and absolutely beautifully read. it has a dream.like quality and beautiful descriptions throughout
Highly recommended

Wonderful story

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Of all Deborah Levy's books I've read so far, I think this one works the best in terms of her style. The repeated scenes and dialogue, the jumping around temporally and geographically all suit the situation. The main character is mostly quite selfish, but as a reader I came to at least empathise with him to some degree (except that I couldn't figure out why he treated his father so abysmally). The other characters are typically Levy eccentrics, but again, they are each consistent with their own raison d'etres. Levy holds enough information back to keep us guessing what is really going on in each scene, or even if it is going on somewhere other than Saul's mind. But she also gives enough clues to make the whole endeavour a reasonable portrait of Saul's situation. To say that I "enjoyed" the book seems a bit perverse, but I think I did.

Discombobulating, but that's purposeful

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