This is a first edition, first print of THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING by Debora Levy. It was published by HAMISH HAMILTON in 2019. It is signed by Levy on the title page.
I adored this book which was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Levy has been shortlisted before with her novels HOT MILK, and SWIMMING HOME, which I am yet to read.
Here is a synopsis -
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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