[New post] ‘Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ’: An Interview With Deborah Levy

Tobias Carroll posted: "Tobias Carroll | Longreads | October 2019 | 10 minutes (2,536 words)   What makes history resonate into the present, and how does memory change that? Deborah Levy's new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything — long-listed for the Booker Prize this yea" New post on Longreads 'Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ': An Interview With Deborah Levy by Tobias Carroll Tobias Carroll | Longreads | October 2019 | 10 minutes (2,536 words)   What makes history resonate into the present, and how does memory change that? Deborah Levy's new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything — long-listed for the Booker Prize this year — follows a British historian named Saul Adler as he prepares for, and then embarks upon, a trip to East Germany in 1988. Whether or not his visit will be a politically compromised one is a question that Saul grapples with as he makes his way into a politically repressive — and repressed — nation. Saul also finds his own desires leading him to unexpected places, from his feelings for his estranged girlfriend in London to his growing attraction to the man he's working with in Germany. If this was the sum total of Levy's novel, it would be enough for a thoughtful, challenging exploration of the personal and political — but Levy has larger goals in mind. Throughout Saul's travels in the first half of the novel, he experiences strangely dissonant moments, places where the narrative ventures into unexpected places and suggests another dimension to the story Levy is telling. In the second half of the novel, those narrative threads pay off dramatically, creating a powerful sense of memory, history, desire, and ideology all converging on a singular point. The Man Who Saw Everything comes at a time when Levy's work has earned an abundance of acclaim: her last two novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her collection Black Vodka was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Longtime readers of Levy's work will know that she's just as capable of voyaging into the surreal and uncanny as she is documenting the social and psychological mores of her characters. Jeff VanderMeer has hailed her early novel Beautiful Mutants for its exploration of the weird, and her memoirs Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living each take significant narrative and structural risks that one doesn't normally see in nonfiction. Add in her forays into the mythic and the archetypal, as in the verse work An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and you have a sense of a writer who's capable of nearly anything. Read more of this post Tobias Carroll | October 15, 2019 at 7:30 am | Tags: Berlin Wall, Books, Deborah Levy, interviews, memory, novels | Categories: Fiction, History, Profiles & Interviews, Story | URL: https://wp.me/p4KhvY-ygf Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Longreads. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://longreads.com/2019/10/15/writing-this-book-was-a-weird-seance-an-interview-with-deborah-levy/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com