The Man Who Saw Everything
DEBORAH LEVY
(HAMISH HAMILTON, 208 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Deborah Levy’s multilayered novel, deservedly longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, spans three decades and blurs time and space. It opens in 1988. Saul is a beautiful but careless young man. He wears eyeliner and a string of his late mother’s pearls. He’s 28 and about to visit the German Democratic Republic where he is to research “cultural opposition to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s”. Just before his departure, he ­suffers a near collision with a car. His ­girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, a talented art student, photographs him crossing Abbey Road in a white suit, echoing the Beatles’ album cover. Both lost their mothers when they were 12 and Saul’s father, a lifelong Communist, has recently died. That evening, Jennifer finishes their relationship.