LITERARY FICTION
THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING
by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton £14.99, 208 pp) READING Deborah Levy’s stylish new time-slip novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, feels like being spun around while blindfolded. Switching between the period before German reunification and the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, it holds up a mirror to recent European history, only to smash it and jumble the shards.
We follow Saul, an eyeliner-wearing historian who is hit by a car and dumped by his artist lover, Jennifer, while in London in 1988; later, in East Berlin, he has a fling with a translator, Walter, whose arrest by the secret police he inadvertently brings about.
But when we cut suddenly to 2016, Saul is knocked down again, à la Groundhog Day, and figures from his past recur, transformed...
As ever with Levy, the crystalline clarity of the prose rubs up against our perplexity about the bigger picture, which is part of the peculiar fascination of a book that demands, and bears, repeated re-reading.
SHELF LIFE
by Livia Franchini (Doubleday £12.99, 288 pp) NARRATED by a 30-year-old nurse, Ruth, this intriguing debut ends up weirder and more structurally adventurous than its chattily plain-spoken opening leads us to expect.
It kicks off amid her gloom following a break-up with Neil, her accountant boyfriend of ten years, who turns cold when she rejects his proposal of an open relationship.
Our hunch that she’s better off without him is confirmed once the narrative starts to be told from his perspective too, ranging back and forth in time to focus as much on his sinister proclivities as on Ruth’s post-monogamy singledom.
We see how Neil schemed to seduce her after first sleeping with her highschool frenemy, Alanna, whose daiquiri-splattered hen night Ruth dutifully arranges in the present.
A morally twisty incident at the care home where Ruth works, involving a lecherous old patient who gets more than he bargained for, makes for a provocative climax to an unpredictable exploration of 21st-century sexual mores.
BEYOND THE SEA
by Paul Lynch (Oneworld £12.99, 192 pp ) THERE’S a perverse relish to be had from just how bad things get in this cheerless story of two men in a boat. Unfolding in rugged, austere paragraphs adrift in white space (one page just reads ‘Storm’), it follows two Latin American fishermen, Bolivar and Hector, who, shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean, cling onto life by drinking their own urine and scavenging barnacles from passing debris, occasionally tucking into a slice of raw turtle.
Their salt-stung tale grows nastier still when the men turn on each other, harsh words leading to vengeful violence.
When, needled by Hector, Bolivar examines his guilt over an abandoned daughter, the question of their survival recedes as the focus shifts to more everyday trials of masculinity.
But while the novel tries to overcome the in-built stasis of its scenario by drumming up interest from Bolivar’s painful backstory, the abiding sense of seabound fog hanging over his characterisation can’t help but dull the impact.