While their relationship is a look at state-imposed limitations on the range of love, it’s also a portrait of a selfish recklessness. There was a kind of energy in his body, a vitality that was relaxed but exciting.” Perhaps Sal’s narcissism shows in that he doesn’t consider that Walter is married, has children, and is fairly happy in East Berlin. He describes him in clear, possessive terms that Jennifer rejects–“He was about thirty, with shoulder-length mousy hair, pale blue eyes, tall, broad shoulders. Soon after meeting him, Saul wants to “free” Walter. It sharply contrasts and complements Saul’s relations with Walter. The novel weaves both subjectivities, creating spindles out of a massive, confusing love that teases questions of obligation, generosity, and dignity. Deborah Levy presents Jennifer and Saul by turns to be 23, 28, 51, 56. That Saul is in the hospital compounds his path toward a truthful account of his past, which as a historian (and so one thinks) temperament, he is drawn to. Their firm defense of their own viewpoint forwards the narrative. The paragraph preface is Saul and Jennifer claiming, “It’s like this.” Their competing narratives ultimately ask who is privileged to tell history? On a personal and social scale, whose stories are told in their own fullness, unblemished by the ulterior motives of narcissistic–if self-stylized, generous–personalities. Their short-lived relationship is couched within his three-decade relationship with Jennifer Moreau, a precocious photographer who refuses to let him describe her, yet alone take her picture.
The two surprise themselves by falling into an intense, two-week affair, one that Saul will ruminate over for the rest of his life. The master linguist Walter Müller is his tour-guide, translator, and de facto state guard. His own tyrannical father was an avowed communist, and his scholarship is historical as much as personal. The novel follows Saul Adler, a historian of male dictators, who secured passage to East Berlin in 1988 through a little white lie about writing something complementary to the regime. Her eighth novel, the exquisite The Man Who Saw Everything, was longlisted for the Booker last year. Levy is often seen in the lobby for the Man Booker Prize, and her novels Hot Milk (2016) and Swimming Home (2012) have both been short-listed. Her mastery of images and plots from theater and poesy consistently translate into page-turning novels and memoirs. The South-African born Brit began as a poet and playwright, working with the Royal Shakespeare Company and publishing poetry collections with such charming titles as An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell (1990). We are lucky to live in the world of Deborah Levy. The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
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