The Man Who Saw Everything

<b>LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019</b><br /><b></b><br /><b>SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2019</b><br /><b></b><br /><b>'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' <i>Daily Telegraph</i> </b><br /><b></b><br /><b>'An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe' <i>The Times</i></b><i> </i><br /><i></i><br /><i>
<b>'The man who had nearly run me over had touched my hair, as if he were touching a statue or something without a heartbeat...'</b>
</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levy's electrifying <i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i> 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.<br /><br /><b>'Levy writes on the high wire, unfalteringly' Marina Warner</b><br /><br /><b>'It's clever, raw and doesn't play by any rules' <i>Evening Standard</i></b><br /><b></b><br /><b>'Intelligent and supple...a dizzying tale of life across time and borders' <i>Finanical Times</i></b>