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It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life. The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine,
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At first, I found it hard to get into this book. Whilst well written, the novel itself was somewhat dull and presented many Intriguing questions, yet no hint to any answers. I pressed on, however, and found a wonderful narrative structure half way through the novel; the exact events at the start of the book repeated themselves, and suddenly the plot became baffling and incomprehensible in all the right ways. At this point, I realised the semi-lucid, often banal dialogue was serving a much larger narrative. Suddenly, it did not matter that questions were not solved, as this character exploration of Saul Adler did not require it.
I do wish, however, that Levy did use the unique turn in the second half of the book, where Saul begins to conflate people and places and times periods on the fly to poke at more connections between our modern day and Saul’s historical research. On the other hand, this may have been out of place in what I imagine to be a deliberately placed and plotted narrative.
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