Book review|In her novel, Deborah Levy tells about the 20th century, ideologies and traumas in her familiar way, building delicious thought games.
A novel
Deborah Levy: The Man Who Saw Everything (The Man Who Saw Everything). Finnish Sari Karhulahti. S&S. 262 pp.
Last year in his translated novel Hot milk (2016) British author Deborah Levy dealt intensively with the mother-daughter relationship and set the events in Spain, on the shores of the Mediterranean. In the man who saw everything (2019), on the other hand, one significant theme is the son’s relationship with his father, and it is considered in East Berlin before the fall of the wall.
The settings therefore resemble each other, and also Levy’s way of telling, which Hot milk in the assessment I called associative, is unchanged. However, now it is even more polished and surprising.
When thoughts were jumped In hot milk through mythology and psychology, now people get to represent their culture, generation and different phases in Europe’s recent history.
Starting point is fascinating: the crosswalk of London’s Abbey Road, where the cover of The Beatles’ album of the same name (1969) was photographed. And like Abbey Road was the last album the band recorded together before disbanding, the mental fragmentation of the novel’s main character also begins at its crossroad.
In the multi-part, chronology-breaking plot, causes and consequences change places, and therefore the reader is often surprised. What do these shifts in time mean? Has Levy written a fantasy novel?
So much is certain in the story that the main character Saul Adler, a 28-year-old historian, goes to East Germany in 1988 to investigate a movement that opposed the 1930s Hitler’s take off. It also turns out that girlfriend Jennifer Moreau takes a picture of Saul at the famous crosswalk before leaving, and that they will soon have a breakup.
Everything else in the novel floats and drifts, and there is no single truth or reliable story about it – that’s often the case in history. It could be that a large part of what is told is actually Saul’s memories, which come to his mind only in 2016, when he is hit by a car and lies in the hospital with a torn spleen.
When Levy skilfully moves and overlaps Saul’s experiences, the novel creates great thought games and weighty comments about the course of history, different ideas and how they affect individuals. No wonder the work was nominated for the Booker prize when it was published.
in East Germany the Jewish British Saul cannot help but think about the relations between the countries with the wars, and Brexit is also mentioned.
The atmosphere of communism reminds the historian Stalin’s about the difficult father relationship and the need to control others, and it takes thoughts to my own childhood home and life as a gay boy discriminated against by my father. Private and public collide, history repeats itself.
Jewish intellectual heritage and the relationship to the Holocaust will also remain on display, as will the relationship between capitalism and communism just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. What do ideologies really do to a person? What does it mean to believe in them? Or do they make a person incapable of believing in anything, of loving anything?
On the other hand, the novel reveals Saul’s personal story, which can be read separately from the political-historical reflection. It is a kind of analysis of a 20th century European person, and even in that the experiences of loving and being loved are essential.
As the story gradually unfolds, both Saul and his loved ones grow into quite multidimensional persons with touching destinies. The stages of Saul and Jennifer’s relationship are revealed, as well as Saul’s struggle to accept his sexual identity.
The same goes for the people he met in East Berlin, friends and loved ones. They struggle too, but the motives and means of showing emotions are different in totalitarianism than in the West. When it comes to surviving, freedom and honesty are also relative concepts.
The third on the album a major theme is looking and seeing, which the novel’s title ironically refers to.
There are countries where citizens are constantly monitored, and photographer Jennifer also believes in pictures much more than words.
On the other hand, pictures can be torn, and you can’t always recognize reality in them. When Saul looks at his reflection in the hospital, he doesn’t know who he sees. The motto of the novel again quotes by Susan Sontag the idea of how photography always objectifies a person.
However, the album does not give up. Once more he transports his person to Abbey Road, amidst the noise of traffic and life. Let’s take a new picture! History doesn’t disappear, but it doesn’t change too much, unless we constantly participate and influence it, walk on our own feet “through deep time”.