Deborah Levy launches The Man Who Saw Everything
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly presents:
Deborah Levy in Conversation with Madeleine Thien for THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING
General Admission: $15
Book + Ticket Combo: $29.95
Rialto Hall : 5711 parc avenue
(Présentation en anglais)
About the book:
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE
An electrifying and audacious novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness by Deborah Levy, two-time Man Booker Prize finalist.
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–and this story of good intentions and reckless actions.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, East and West, past and present–to reveal the full spectrum of our world.
About the Author
Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels, including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, and two volumes of memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living. Both Swimming Home and Hot Milk were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O’Connor short story award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatisations of Freud’s iconic case studies, Dora, and The Wolfman. Levy has written for The Royal Shakespeare Company, and her pioneering theatre writing is collected in Levy: Plays 1. Deborah Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.