For me, Deborah Levy’s books are one such example. They all have something in common – the style of writing and method of storytelling – which you either love or feel somewhat ambivalent about. So, imagine, then, that the novels written by one specific author are like a family. At other times the acquaintance is hard work and your head tells you to give up, but your heart says perhaps the relationship deserves another chance. Sometimes it takes a little longer, but you end up becoming best friends, almost organically, without noticing. When I asked her why I was silenced in this way, she said, ‘Because you only have old words to describe me.’”īooks are like people. “I was thinking about how Jennifer Moreau had told me I was never to describe her beauty, not to her, or to anyone else.
The sentiment chimes with the protagonist’s thoughts in the opening lines of the novel: “To photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves by having knowledge of them they can never have, it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” Cited on the title page of The Man Who Saw Everything is this salient quotation by Susan Sontag from ‘In Plato’s Cave’, one of five essays in the collection entitled, ‘On Photography’ (1977):
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