“I wanted to tell Jennifer that I loved her, but I thought it might put her off me.” From there, he heads to communist East Berlin, carrying a matchbox-full of his father’s ashes, and forms a friendship with Walter Müller which blossoms into a sexual love affair. Saul Adler promptly gets up, makes little fuss, and carries on to the home of his student girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, where he makes a slap-dash marriage proposal and is met with a breakup instead. It’s 1988, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Saul is crossing Abbey Road when he’s knocked down by a car. His afternoon tea always included gazelle horns.Raised by a communist father in England, by the rules and guidelines of socialism, Saul is now an academic in his late twenties, studying the history and politics of communist nations in Eastern Europe. If you’ve read this book, the obvious food pairing is a tin of pineapple… but I enjoyed the scene where the new vice chancellor at the main character’s university has his staff racing around preparing his elaborate tea-trays. After that it’s a blur but I think I had less sex in social democracies than I did in authoritarian regimes. I think I have extended my sexual history across all time zones, but I did have a lot of sex before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I have sex all the time but I don’t know if it’s the sex I had thirty years ago or three months ago.
To my horror, it seemed my father was a kind man.Īnd lastly, just so you know that Levy has a sense of humour – The structure of this book is creative, and it is through structure that Levy challenges our concept of memory – how much does memory inform who we are in the present? Are our memories all we are? How and why does one person’s memory of an event vary so significantly from another’s? She wanted to escape from a reality that was so rational it was a little bit mad. Levy uses the Wall as a way of exploring before and after conscious and unconscious transgressions and real and imagined betrayals. In this story, the Berlin Wall is the central motif. If you’ve read Levy in the past and appreciate her off-beat, slightly weird characters and her particular writing style – is there a word for detailed but pared-back at the same time? – then The Man Who Saw Everything won’t disappoint.Īs always with Levy, I feel as if there’s meaning embedded in every single detail, half of which I miss.
I was embarrassed beyond measure to have brought such a large portion of my own sorrow to the GDR. If that’s not enough to convince you, know there’s an extraordinarily clever plot twist.
If stories about East Germany, or The Beatles, or how memory works are of interest, add this book to your list. There’s a blurb, but don’t worry about it. Welcome to my first review of 2021 where I say absolutely nothing about the plot of the book.ĭeborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything is best read cold.
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