Blurb quotes on the Kindle edition and a few reviews I’ve found online say this novel is about history, totalitarianism, the nature of love.  A time-bending sort of post-modernist Zelig meets the Hallmark Channel.  Which is not what I found in the reading of it; not at all.

I do get the time-bending comment: with sections introduced by chapters titled London, September 1988, East Berlin, September 1988 and London, June 2016  but passages within each of those wherein protagonist Saul Adler seems not to know which time period he is in.  That effect is subtle though, until, in what we are given to believe is 1988, Saul says he noticed “a small, flat, rectangular object” lying in the road and, a few moments later, that “The object was speaking.  There was definitely a voice inside it…”  As confirmed later, we readers recognize that object as a cell phone; but not of any type that would have existed in 1988.

A few chapters later, while speaking with his lover Walter in Berlin and still in 1988, Saul foretells him of the fall of the Soviet Union, toppling of Berlin’s wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Nowhere does Levy explain this prophecy as result of magic, time travel, or anything else.  The incident is just dryly related, and the reader left to puzzle.  Other anomalies follow, at first few and far between but then more frequent until, by the final chapters, Saul has clearly come unmoored from the present and is adrift among all the times he’s lived, and all their places and events.

One possible wink from the author: Jennifer’s highly regarded and financially successful art photography is described as being all about damage, distortion and breaking images into random parts and pieces – just as memory disrupts and rearranges our recall of the past.

Throughout, even as Saul’s language suggests he is narrating events in the present tense there seem to be jumps and skips between paragraphs, incidents, even lines. Descriptive passages tend toward the skeletal: rather than fulsome observations connected to a situation, we get tiny scraps of setting, one odd bit here, another unrelated and seemingly insignificant bit there.  Much the way old memories may consist only of whichever odd details lodged most deeply in the archive, rather than the organized observations one would consider worth noting while inside the situation.

Eventually, Saul is hospitalized and terminally ill (though no one ever identifies a specific malady) and we hear those around him patronizing, papering over his misidentification of doctors as characters from his past.  At which point it seems certain that Saul is suffering from dementia.  Which realization, considering those odd anomalies earlier on, led me to conclude with somewhat less certainty that the entire novel from start to finish consists of his dementia-altered memories. Initially these track somewhat closely with real events and linear time but later, as his illness progresses, the recollections become peppered with progressively more holes, more starts, stops and doubling back until, in the last, he jumbles every time and place and person together. ‘Seeing everything,’ as the title suggests, but all at once,. This  climaxes as Saul recalls/imagines himself crossing Abbey Road in a scene which has been recounted several times over the novel’s course, varying each time but always ending in an mid-road collision. In this final instance, Saul makes it all the way across the road and reaches out to take the outstretched hand of Luna, another lover from his youth who went missing in Berlin back in 1989 and never resurfaced.  Never, that is, until this last ‘crossing over’ moment of Saul’s addled (hence the surname Adler?) memory/imagining.

I have no direct knowledge what was the author’s intent; it’s quite possible that I’m misreading things altogether. I readily admit dryness and nonlinearity of this Booker Prize long-list honoree are not my native terrain; it may all be above my comprehension.  For this reader, though, the political or sociological commentary which others seem to find here feel peripheral, more context than theme.  What I do strongly connect to is the intensely personal portrait of a mind going to pieces due to some form of progressive age-related dementia.

If one is up for that, The Man Who Saw Everything has much to offer. 

P.S. – speaking of going to pieces, the new novel E Unum Pluribus, is currently available online, in six free installments.

Packed with intrigue and fueled by politics, economics and murder (as well as gender, class, language and even the origins of faith), E Unum Pluribus imagines how the USA’s current ‘culture wars’ may bring about its end, and the chaos of smaller sovereignties which might rise from ro replace it. 

Anyone can read this novel totally for free simply by navigating to the home page of this website and selecting E Unum Pluribus from the top menu, or via this link: https://robinandrew.net/2026/01/01/e-unum-pluribus/