The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

 Thursday, May 13, 2021--San Antonio

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy is a confusing book.  It's meant to be that way.  Everyone reading it has to decide what's happening and why things are supposedly known in advance of when they happen.  I've come to my own conclusion which I will type two lines below where I give my rating for the book, so SPOILER ALERT for then.

The story is told from the perspective of a British scholar who teaches Eastern European history and makes a research trip to East Berlin in 1988.  His mother died when he was 10, and he was raised by his manual laborer father who believed in socialism as the best political solution for overcoming poverty and hardship along with his brother who was also a manual laborer.  He had little in common with either of them.  He appears to be sexually fluid with the father and brother being confounded by the way he is "different" from what they expect him to be.  For instance, he wears his mother's string of pearls every day from the time of her death as a way of remembering her as his protector within the family while she was alive and he has sexual relationships with both men and women.  Also, he is so narcissistic that he has difficulty maintaining any relationships due to thinking only of his own needs and interests with no concern about those of others.   On his research trip to East Berlin, he demonstrates a suspicion of Stasi agents having listening bugs, following him, etc., while not being aware enough that expressing his love via letter to a man and trying to help a woman get the opportunity to escape to the west via the efforts of a new local acquaintance who has a better standard of living and more privileges than the normal East German standards are ill-advised acts that could get him and the others all in trouble.  In time, the reader learns a lot about what has happened, but has to come to his/her own conclusion regarding the true circumstances.  I gave the book a rating of 4 stars out of 5.

SPOILER:  Personally, I think the character is suffering from dementia.  I think that in the first half of the book he is remembering the distant memories from 1988 and describing them rather clearly because he is in the early stages of dementia when long-term memory is better than short-term memory.  That would explain why the story is told so clearly while he also somehow already knows that in just a year, the wall will come down.  In the second half of the book, his dementia has progressed to the point that he is mixing memories up in his mind and making associations between memories that may not be related.  By the end, he is jumping quickly through his memories as they flash through his mind as a part of the dying process.