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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

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
to try at something for a whole lifetime. which really is barely enough time to cross a road.

It's so Human

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beautifully read/performed.
well written. interesting historically.
confusing though. unlikeable and underdeveloped characters. need to read.

pleased it's over.

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This book is exceptional. Hard to describe why. The alluring character of Saul - with his pearl necklace, PhD in Eastern European history and Marc Bolan looks - never quite connects with anyone until he finds himself in a morphine induced haze of recollection, rencountering all the loves of life. i think it's the description of this "haze", which is one of the most beautiful, poetic yet completely unsentimental accounts of human connection that i've come across.

incredible, touching, intense and magical...

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The pronunciation of German and other languages could be improved, but other than that this is a beautiful, moving story performance. There is so much here! I could listen again and again.

Rich reading experience

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