PENGUIN The Man Who Saw Everything

What a brilliant piece of work! I was curious about this book the moment I had been aware of its publication, however, I didn’t read it then for some reason which I am not conscious of anymore. At that time, I did not know what I was avoiding. Nonetheless, I am glad I finally picked it up and flew through the story in four days amidst meeting deadlines for my semester. A little different from ‘Hot Milk’, here, Levy has gravitated toward a male protagonist, Saul Adler. She has placed him in London, 1988, as he makes his way over a zebra crossing in a white suit to mimic the famous Beatles photograph. In that moment, she freezes her protagonist, his life begins changing since then. From his breakup, to flying to East Germany and falling in love with a man; Saul Adler isn’t the same anymore. Between shifts in memory and cluelessness of time; we find Saul Adler moving in and out of himself in search for something, for someone to offer an answer, a meaning to his struggles in perpetuity. He is in search of transcendence or a consciousness; a moment to be born again and to not relive the life he has lived. At the same time, all he wishes is for life to repeat itself, to whisper forgiveness into his ears and begin again. Levy plays with her character(s) through a stream of consciousness taking leaps from one moment to another. I love Levy’s protagonists. Whether it is Sofie from ‘Hot Milk’ or Saul Adler, they come from academic backgrounds to study the social and the political. They step out in search for knowledge for the other; and end up finding something else all together. The beauty of Levy’s prose is its ability to let the story take shape through her characters. Notwithstanding their duration in the story, each of her characters contribute to something important and symbolic to overall story. She lets them speak through her seamless flow of words running from one page to another. This book was fascinating in its style and the use of language. Yes, it is a little complex and dense, and one has to read with patience to not lose the thread of the author’s purpose. I would still prefer it to ‘Hot Milk’. There was something refreshing and moving to read about memory and time portrayed in a story with such care and rawness. I highly recommend this book!

Surreal, psychoanalytic puzzle of a man searching for his memory. A brilliant book.

I love novels that play with the fluidity of time. McEwan's Child in Time is a favourite, Lorrie Moore's Anagrams another. This is a third. The way Levy plays with and explores time in this novel is its highpoint (along with her, as ever, rich sensory prose.) She tells, not the story, but the life of angelically beautiful Saul Adler, his past, present, future, alternative pasts and futures, roads not taken, accidentally taken (the novel hinges around him stepping out onto the Abbey Road zebra crossing, perhaps for a photo shoot) and deliberately taken. Time slides with a sumptuous fluidity in and out of the consequences of Saul's few actions in his troubled, pretty life, taking him to the GDR before the Berlin Wall came down, having him fall in love with his translator there, but sleep with the translator's sister. He lies in a coma in his fifties, but perhaps he has been in it since his twenties. Perhaps he never made it to East Germany. The novel has no plot, just as life has no plot, and that might irritate people looking for one, but it's refreshing if you are getting tired of over-engineered stories. Four stars not five because I found the voice too mannered at times - the endless 'It's like this, Saul Adler:'; 'It's like this Jennifer Moreau' was overly stylised and intrusive, making me aware of the writing when I wanted to stay inside the time-ripple worlds that Levy created. But overall, it was a delight. Recently I went to a talk by a Chinese author who explained there are no tenses in Chinese. Everything is present tense because that's all we have: whether we're experiencing what's happening, remembering what happened or imagining what will happen, we can only do this right now. English grammar with its very rigid tenses that lock time into categories makes it hard for us to imagine another way of experiencing time, and I think Levy has done a wonderful job of making this possible. I'd love to know how it would work translated into a language like Chinese - whether much of that nuance would be diluted. Overall - rich and refreshing and different.

I have read the opening of this several times, as well as the whole novel once. There seems to be a basic problem with it, for me at least, which is that try as I might I can't manage to believe that the opening incident happens to, is happening to, a man. I see a woman every time. I see a handbag. The spilt contents of a handbag. The same throughout, really. In little dramatic moments I see a young woman, not a man. The novel is strongly written, within this fault; the writing is compelling. However, there is another fault with the novel as conceived, which is that it seems incomplete. Whole chapters seem still to need writing. It is too bare bones without the rapid movements between points of view that make the other novel of hers I have read work better. It is as if the novelist hasn't realised the implications of her more static viewpoint.

I read Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living and enjoyed it but have not read her fiction. I am normally enthralled by erudite literary fiction with a twist, so this seemed made for me. Was I ever wrong. I didn't make it past page 45. I just couldn't care at all about the characters and the story also fell flat. There needs to be some kind of thread or backbone to draw the reader in when you are trying to build a nonsensical, whimsical world or story around a more or less believable character (a researcher). I really want to give it two stars but am going with three because I do like the quality of the writing and what she is trying to do.