Barcelona, 4 Dec (EFE) on how “we live in History and how History lives in us” in “The Man Who Saw It All”.
In an interview with EFE, the novelist assures that “the story is personal, political, psychological, existential, something that is told and retold from many different points of view, but which is there forever.”
“The story has been inside me since I was a child, I internalized that Marx smoked too much or had ulcers, as well as the great human rights struggles in South Africa, even though we left the country when I was very young,” she said . she says she.
During a visit to Barcelona, the author of “The Cost of Living” talked about her latest title, candidate for the Booker Prize, where through different timelines she presents the character of Saul Adler, invested twice, in 1988 and in 2016 to the legendary pedestrian crossing of Abbey Road, right where the Beatles walked in 1969 and immortalized the Scotsman Iain MacMillan with his camera.
Published by Random House, and by Angle in Catalan, the book moves between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Brexit, with a protagonist, a historian, who in 1988, at the age of 28, is hit by a Jaguar in Abbey Road, shortly before leaving for East Germany for academic research, and who will relive the same experience in 2016, in the midst of the debate on his country’s exit from the European Union.
Levy, who was born in South Africa and emigrated with her family to England when she was nine, recalls that when she sat at her computer “there was growing nationalism in Britain with discussions of border closures which, shortly after, Donald Trump also used to talk about building walls to keep immigrants out.”
This question led her to her literary artifact as she wondered whether “people really understand what it is like to live without freedom of movement, as happened in the GDR, where a wall was built to keep East Germans in, rather than to keep the others out”.
Furthermore, he wanted to see how a regime like the communist one at the time, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, would behave with a character like Saul, “who likes both men and women, who is incredibly handsome, and who doesn’t it doesn’t fit the old-fashioned idea of masculinity.”
This man also draws attention to the fact that he wears a pearl necklace that belonged to his deceased mother, a jewel that appears in his other novels.
She says she “loves” pearls, while flaunting the necklace she’s wearing under her sweater, because they “absorb the heat of the skin very well” and, in this case, they helped her get into character.
According to him, «a writer not only has arguments, he has to give them substance and, in this novel, the pearls have a meaning because Saul takes them off his dead mother’s body and takes them to be closer to her, while his father, a very authoritative man , he can’t believe he has them around his neck.”
When asked about the three volumes of her ‘Autobiography in Construction’ – ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’, ‘The Cost of Living’ and ‘A Home of One’s Own’ – where readers can learn some familiar insights and her thoughts on womanhood or on social roles, he points out that “in reality, writing an autobiography is writing about others”.
She claims that “one doesn’t live alone, it’s not an island, we all create ourselves through others” and adds with amusement that in London, when she rides her electric bicycle, there are those who greet her.
Many times you think “Do I know him?” and then she realizes he must be a reader of hers and, says, “Hi, too.”
Regarding what he thinks Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux is the latest Nobel Prize winner in literature, she replied that she was happy to hear her name on the day of the proclamation. “It was an act of justice,” she concludes with conviction.
Irene Dalmases
(c) EFE Agency
