Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Invisible Women is the story of what happens when we forget to account for half of humanity. It is an exposé of how the gender data gap harms women when life proceeds, more or less as normal. In urban planning, politics, the workplace. It is also about what happens to women living in a world built on male data when things go wrong. When they get sick. When they lose their home in a flood. When they have to flee that home because of war.

My husband is not a knuckle-dragging caveman, but he is a middle-aged, white, Canadian male, totally oblivious to the privileges afforded to him by our society (admittedly, many of those privileges are granted to me as well). We were in the car, listening to the radio over the summer, and “It's a Man's World” began to play. Dave chuckled and said, “Boy, things have changed, eh?” And I replied: “And boy, have they stayed the same.” And this stunned him. “You can't believe that,” he said. “Here's a story for you then. A young girl at work...” I cut him off. “Young girl? What, is she eight or nine?” And then he was flustered. “You know what I mean. I'm just trying to tell you a nice story.” He paused like he was going to punish me by not telling me the story after all but soon continued: “Rebecca, who is probably twenty-five and on my team, was asked by HR to assemble some slides for a presentation on the industry and she asked me if she could present it to me first. She reads off the first slide, which is about the gender pay gap, and before she went to the next slide she frowned, looked at her notes, and said, 'This is probably American data.' Because she knows that there's no gender pay gap in our office, and if anything, there are more women than men in senior positions, and more women on a management track.” He looked proud of himself – and he should, I know that this non-caveman, the father of my daughters, is not a sexist or a chauvinist – but still I pushed my point: “If this had been a twenty-five year old male in your story, would you have started off with, 'This young boy at work...?' Because that's what hasn't changed, and no matter what you consciously do to promote the careers and the welfare of the women you know, it's the subconscious biases that are harder for us to navigate because you don't even know what you're doing that's holding us back.” Dave, “shocked” to discover I felt this way, wanted more details about these “subconscious biases” of which I accused him. And while women know that the systems are rigged against us, it's hard to be specific – until now. Caroline Criado Perez has assembled a collection of shocking and eye-opening stories in Invisible Women, very clearly making the point that men, for the most part, aren't consciously trying to hold women back; for the most part, men don't think about women, and the fact that our needs might differ from their own, at all. From medicine to safety devices to public transit, everything is designed and tested to suit the typical male's body and needs, with women's very different bodies and needs considered niche or secondary or “the same but smaller”. It is mostly about the gender data gap: the fact that nearly all studies and research, even medical testing, isn't disaggregated by sex, so there is next to no data about how anything in our societies, which tend to be designed by men for men, affects women differently than men. And where this is no data, a thing – in this case, women – is in effect invisible to those who do the planning – in most cases, men. Informative, shocking, and usefully prescriptive, Invisible Women is a must read for men and women everywhere.

The specifics are fascinating – dysmenorrhea (extremely painful periods) was found to be completely alleviated without side effects in the early stages of Viagra testing, but its manufacturer stopped that direction of testing when it found the drug's more profitable application; women in police forces and armies around the world are forced to wear male body armour that doesn't account for breasts and hips and therefore leaves them vulnerable to attack and more prone to workplace injury (a female police officer in Spain was disciplined for acquiring her own made-for-women bulletproof vest); NGOs tend to ask the male heads of household what is required in the aftermath of a disaster, which has, more than once, led to the construction of homes without kitchens in them – but it would take a book-length review to list everything fascinating in this book. I'll just add some of Criado Perez's conclusions regarding the invisibility of women in public planning:

When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we've seen, this isn't just a matter of justice; it's also a matter of simple economics.

The invisibility of women in the workplace:

Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign – of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture – and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives.

And the invisibility of women in the political sphere:

The data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world's population. We have to stop willfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.

The first step to true equality of opportunity and outcome would be to close this gender data gap – wherever there is evidence of inequality, decent people do tend to advocate for change – but this will take more women in decision-making roles (it's disheartening to read of the many researchers who can't get grants to study issues that affect only women as they are too “niche”) and that takes time. I remember back in the 80s my mother complaining that the medical world tended to treat women like small men instead of maybe, just maybe, something not the same as men. So, yeah, that was a long time ago and it's still a man's world.

The Home for Unwanted Girls

Elodie is an orphan, which, Tata has explained, means she does not have a mother or a father. When Elodie once asked her why not, she was told quite plainly, “You live in a home for unwanted girls because you were born in sin and your mother could not keep you.”

There's a really shocking true story at the core of The Home for Unwanted Girls: After having, for years, downloaded the care of orphans and psychiatric patients to the Catholic Church, Quebec's provincial government began, in the 1950s, to merge the two types of institutions; declaring orphan children to be mentally ill or delayed in order to claim a Federal subsidy that was three times higher for asylums than for orphanages (this apparently saved the province millions, was hugely profitable for the Church, with both now denying responsibility for these “Duplessis Orphans” ). But this story isn't really what this book is about (even the title refers to an orphanage that is soon repurposed as an asylum on “Change of Vocation Day” in the narrative): What author Joanna Goodman mainly focuses on is a melodramatic love story and a fraught quest for a young mother to learn the fate of the infant daughter she had been forced to give up as a teenager. With low-level prose and extraneous plotlines that add nothing to the main narrative (rape! infidelity! divorce!), I was definitely more impatient than delighted with this book.

Feelings come in waves. Grief, relief, shame, guilt. She could have kept the baby. She's not blameless. Instead, her infant daughter is about to be hurled into the world all alone. She will grow up untethered, incomplete. They both will.

Maggie begins to drift off, lulled by the rain battering the windows. In that place between sleep and alertness, the name comes back to her. She whispers it into the night. Elodie.

I will find you, she thinks, slowly succumbing to sleep. It's a promise as much to herself as to her newborn daughter. I will get you back and make it right.

In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Goodman thanks her mother and the long talks they had about her Montreal childhood for the inspiration she provided for the book's main character, Maggie. I don't know if that means that Goodman's mother had been forced to give up an infant born out of wedlock, or if she simply had the pure laineFrench mother and Anglo father that provides so much of the background tension in Maggie's story, but either way, the details of this character's life just feel so extraneous to the narrative (ie. Maggie gets a job translating a French author's work into English, which has nothing to do with the story, and which doesn't even become the main focus of her working life, so that's either pointless or something that Goodman's mother did and the author decided to leave in for “authenticity”.) For the most part, this book is Maggie's story, interspersed with chapters from the forsaken child, Elodie's, point-of-view, but I would have found the whole thing more interesting (and definitely more informative) if the book had, instead, concentrated on Elodie's journey:

“Stop barking or I'll get Sister Louiselle,” Elodie threatens. Sister Louiselle is the meanest nun at Saint-Sulpice. She arrived with the crazies two years ago to manage the mental patients and teach the nuns – who previously had only ever cared for orphans – how to run the place like a hospital. Big Abéline growls. She weighs about 250 pounds and could crush seven-year-old Elodie like an ant. Still, it's Elodie's job to wash Abéline before bed, which means scrubbing her back and under her armpits and even her private parts, which Elodie always skips.

Elodie's story takes large jumps in time: she's four years old, living a relatively happy life in a home for unwanted girls (it's never explained why this orphanage is just for girls, but it makes for a good title); she's seven years old and forced to help care for the mental patients who are transferred into their institution; she's ten years old and declared mentally unwell, along with many others, and sent to a children's psychiatric institute in Montreal; she's fourteen and working like a slave in the asylum's sewing shop, trying to avoid being assaulted by male caretakers and mistreated by evil nuns; she's seventeen and just waiting to age out. There are hints of torture, forged paperwork, and unnecessary lobotomies, but these institution-based chapters are never the focus of the story. Even when Elodie is released when she's old enough, we're told that she has trouble trusting people and learning to navigate the world on the outside, but nothing about her character seems authentic as a survivor of life-long abuse and neglect. 

There's really a perfect symmetry to it all, Maggie thinks, a sweet, symbiotic full circle that's led them to this moment.

And if an author feels the need to have a character acknowledge that her story arc ends with “perfect symmetry”, then that author is admitting to Hollywood-ending-style narrative laziness; this does not feel like a real life. I think that this material deserves to have been better treated – apparently Goodman's source material on the conversion of orphanages into asylums, Pauline Gill's Les Enfants de Duplessis, doesn't have an English translation – and what has resulted is an opportunity lost. C'est dommage.

Quichotte

It was settled. He climbed out of bed in his striped pyjamas – more quickly than was his wont – and actually clapped his hands. Yes! This would be the pseudonym he would use in his love letters. He would be her ingenious gentleman, Quichotte. He would be Lancelot to her Guinevere, and carry her away to Joyous Gard. He would be – to quote Chaucer's Canterbury Tales – her verray, parfit, gentil knyght.

The first chapter of Quichotte recalled for me all of the elements I had so admired in early works by Salman Rushdie – the organic magical realism, the easy intertexuality, the engagingly polymathic factoids, the humour – and I thought I was in for a real treat (and especially since this book had already made the cut to the shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker Prize before I picked it up). And then the second chapter reframes what happens in the first – curiouser and curiouser! – and I was thoroughly enjoying this book right up until it all got to be just too much. In the end, I admire many passages and ideas from Quichotte, but it didn't add up to the piercing social critique that I believe Sir Rushdie intended with this one; will still round up to four stars. [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in the final forms. Slightly spoilery from here.]

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels and, yes, unforgivable things: about Indian immigration, racism towards them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche.

Quichotte (pronounced Key-SHOT) begins with the story of Ismail Smile: an aging Indian-American pharmaceuticals salesman who, after a stroke, so obsessively binge-watched television that he began to mentally blur the lines between reality and fiction; eventually, like Don Quixote himself, declaring an undying love for an unattainable fair maiden (in this case, a Bollywood-turned Hollywood-turned Daytime Talkshow Star) and commencing on a quest to win her hand. In the second chapter, we meet “Brother” (aka Sam DuChamp): an aging Indian-American second-rate crime writer who has decided, late in life, to attempt to write something of more literary value, beginning with the preceeding chapter. As the book progresses, we alternate between reading of Brother's personal history and seeing how he transforms the facts of a real life into fiction, and as a concept, that was all interesting enough. What starts as a grail quest – a journey through the seven valleys that must purify the soul before one can be joined with the Beloved – ends (weirdly) in more sci-fi territory, and along the way, Brother's characters expose America's opioid epidemic, racism and violence towards brown-skinned people, “cancel” culture, billionaires pushing at scientific frontiers, and with Brother's own quick trip to England, the rise in nationalism and identity politics in that country as well. Rushdie crams in incessant references from pop culture and high culture, and by having Brother explain to his son (named “Son”) his writing processes, we can never forget that Rushdie is writing a book about writing a book and he wants us to know what he's doing:

He tried to explain the picaresque tradition, its episodic nature, and how the episodes of such a work could encompass many manners, high and low, fabulist and commonplace, how it could be at once parodic and original, and so through its metamorphic roguery it could demonstrate and seek to encompass the multiplicity of human life. 

In a time filled with fake news and where reality TV stars can attain high office, it does seem a fitting moment to examine the nature of “reality” itself, but I really didn't find any new ideas in this book. I liked that Quichotte's Sancho was wished for from thin air – and therefore able to examine the nature of his own reality (all while sensing the presence of the author writing his story; or is that God?) – but his conclusions didn't shatter my worldview:

I am new to the human race, he thought, but it seems to me that this species is mistaken, or perhaps deluded, about its own nature. It has become so accustomed to wearing its masks that it has grown blind to what lies beneath. Here in this bus I'm being given a glimpse of reality, which is more fantastic, more dreadful, more to be feared than my poor words can express. Tonight we are a capsule containing evidence of human life and intelligence, sent hurtling into the black deeps of the universe to tell anyone who might be listening, we are here. This is us. We are the golden record aboard the Voyager, containing memories of the sounds of the Earth. We are the map of the Earth engraved on the Keo spacrcraft, the drop of blood in the diamond. We are the Hydra-headed representative of Planet Three, the many melded into one. Maybe we are the Last Photographs in the time capsule satellite orbiting the Earth, which, long after we have extinguished the last traces of ourselves, will tell aliens who we once were. We are scary as shit.

As the reviews here on Goodreads are overwhelmingly favourable for Quichotte, I'm going to note that professional critics seem less impressed. Johanna Thomas-Corr writes in The Guardian: While Quichotte is funny, it’s rarely as funny as Rushdie thinks it is. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world ends. Or at least before he ends. And Ron Charles at The Washington Post concludes: It would be easier to step over these thematic bricks thrown in our path if the novel’s characters offered any emotional substance, but by design they’re just constructs in this literary game. And so we die-hard fans of Salman Rushdie keep turning the pages, hoping for a reward commensurate to the journey. Alas, that’s starting to feel like an impossible dream. 

I agree with both of those reviews but I'll still round up to four stars: Rushdie is an undeniably fine writer, and while what he put into Quichotte feels a little commonplace and obvious, it is so stuffed with cultural references and truthful observations that I can imagine this book being read many years from now as a true artefact of our times.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

Lampedusa

 

The past seemed a great flowing passage through which his bloodline passed, back through the wastrel grandfathers and great-grandfathers, to the saints and holy men of the eighteenth century, to the legendary civic figures of the seventeenth and the royal granting of Lampedusa in 1667 and the first Tomasi's wedding to the heiress of Palma, and deeper, back up the coast to Naples, to Capua, and further back to Siena, and then into the fog of an almost time, to Lepanto or Cyprus or the age of Tiberius in Rome. And he understood his great regret: after him would come nothing. He had produced neither son nor daughter. He had failed them all.

In real life, Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi – the last Prince of Lampedusa – wrote his only novel near the end of his life (The Leopard) which was rejected for publication, twice, while he was still alive and has never been out of print since its postmortem release; currently considered the classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it is taught and studied widely. Now, Canadian author Steven Price has fictionalised Giuseppe's life in Lampedusa, suggesting the forces that would have led the Prince to take up novel writing late in life, making clear that when Giuseppe was writing about his own great-grandfather's witnessing of the end of an era (as Garibaldi ushered in the Risorgimento) he was really examining the end of his own era (in the aftermath of WWII), and in a flash of dramatic irony (for how can it be otherwise when an author imagines another author's struggles), Price makes clear Giuseppe's (I suppose any writer's) quest for meaning and immortality. Lampedusa is stuffed with biographical and period detail, has a heavy and elegiac tone, and makes for slow reading. It is also thoughtful, lyrical, and tells the story of an extraordinary life. One thing for sure: now I want to read The Leopard. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

All summer as he had set down his pen and screwed the lid back onto his jar of ink and studied his hands he had seen the flesh of an old man, a failed man. Perhaps, he thought, art could not be created without the failings of its maker. Perhaps it was the very weakness of the writer that made the writing human, and therefore moving, and therefore worth preserving. He had understood for a long time that the world was greater by far than anything he could offer it, and that what he had most longed for, the creation of something to outlive him, a testament in his own hand, would most likely fail in the end. But what he had not understood before was how the strain of the attempt constituted the greater labour. Which, he supposed, as the evenings had lightened in the curtains of his study, was not so very different from the labour of living itself.

According to this narrative, Giuseppe Tomasi was diagnosed with emphysema in 1955, at fifty-nine years old, and this was the primary prompting he (an aristocratic man of leisure who had always read and studied literature for pleasure) needed to begin to write his only novel; the effort taking twelve months and instantly declared a masterpiece by his wife and close friends. Over the course of this year, Giuseppe consciously makes parallels between himself and the fictional prince he writes about, has occasion to contemplate his entire biographical history, and takes trips to various family estates for inspiration and fact-checking; an entire life and its setting is organically related in this way. Between Giuseppe's physical discomfort, his yearnings to be well-received by the literary world, and the regrets that his life has left him with, this is a consistently downbeat read, but I guess that's life; Giuseppe certainly feels real and whole and deserving of empathy.

His gaze would pass first over the dark entrance of a street he knew too well, and it was here that the old quarter lost its beauty for him and became something other than a part of an ancient city on a quiet coastline of Sicily. For Via Valverde opened onto Via di Lampedusa, and he knew that there lay the crumbling plaster and stone of his beloved palazzo, where his mother had lived out her final years, thin, sullen, solitary, a faint reflection of the dazzling creature she had once been, where she had been discovered dead one morning in a ruined armchair in the bombed-out library, under an open sky, one more casualty of a war that had been ended for two years already and yet would not ever end, having destroyed both the past and the future and leaving in the present nothing but devastation and grief.

I wouldn't call this an enjoyable read, exactly – unlike Price's last novel, By Gaslight, which I loved for its twisting plot and punchy language – but Lampedusa is artful and fascinating in its own way. Four stars is a rounding up.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.

Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

I'm not chasing people. I'm chasing shadows, phantoms that flit in and out of a surveillance video. That's on a good night. On the other nights, I'm chasing darkness.

I'm not a True Crime aficionado, but as the genre seems to be “having a moment” right now, I've been receiving quite a few True Crime ARCS; and as I do like keeping up with what's on trend, I keep reading them. All to say: I'm not the perfect audience for Billy Jensen's Chase Darkness With Me(I didn't even recognise the author's name, although I've been told he's famous enough that I should have), but I do appreciate what makes this book different: Jensen has gone from working as a journalist covering crime stories to becoming an internet sleuth – successfully having assisted the police in tracking down cold case criminals and missing persons – and the closure that he provides satisfies both the demands of storytelling and of justice. However, while I admire the work Jensen does, I don't admire his writing style. This was not for me. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“This is my job,” I said to myself, sitting up in bed. I'm the guy who finds the people who don't read the newspaper or watch the news anymore. I travel to where you now live. Your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds. As you're scrolling through Family Guy memes and pictures of your nephew's new baby, I'm the one interrupting your bliss with FRESNO GANG MEMBER'S HOT MUGSHOT GOES VIRAL, 32 MOST MEMORABLE JUGGALOS WE SAW AT THE GATHERING, or MOM CAUGHT ON CAMERA POISONING YOUNG SON TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL. I try to make it so irresistible that there is no way that you are not going to click on the link, come to the websites I work for, and see the story alongside the accompanying ads. The evisceration of newspapers forced me to create this particular set of skills for myself.

This book starts off as a quite engrossing memoir (everything about Jensen's dad was fascinating), interestingly explains how Jensen developed his techniques for crowdsourced sleuthing, but right around the point where Jensen begins to describe working to finish I'll Be Gone in the Dark after the death of his friend Michelle McNamara – all while trying to solve cold cases and attempting to develop his ideas into a television show – the story becomes repetitive, overwrought, and dull. As inherently interesting as the material might be, Jensen doesn't seem to have the writing skills to pull this off.

Are you ready to follow the trail of one of the most sadistic serial killers the world never knew it produced? The man who would sidle up to a mother and children, molest the children, kill the mother, use the children to lure another set of mother and children into his web, then kill the first children and start the whole wicked cycle all over again until he “marries” a woman in a Star Trek-wedding ceremony, kills her, and buries her body under a 250-pound pile of kitty litter?

Again, I admire the fact that Jensen's unpaid and often unacknowledged amateur investigations have led to the capture of bad guys and the identification of long-unnamed remains of victims, but I do question the appropriateness of the last section of this book, in which Jensen lays out his rules and techniques for readers to begin their own cold case investigations. It's undeniably disheartening to read of the number of unsolved homicides there are in the U.S., the tens of thousands of untested rape kits, all that DNA waiting to be uploaded and cross-matched, all those grainy CCTV videos waiting to be put in front of the one person who might identify a perp. And while a lack of funds and manpower is the understandable defense of overworked police departments, I truly wonder at the implications of an army of amateurs flooding them with questionable tips and leads. As the title proclaims, Jensen wants the reader to chase darkness with him, and I'm a little horrified at the thought. But then again, I'm not the perfect audience for this read; if only it had been better written. Three stars is a rounding up.

The Man Who Saw Everything

Walter Müller wore trainers that were not at all trendy. His mousy hair fell to his shoulders. His pale blue eyes were all over me. Surveillance was the air everyone breathed. He watched me all the time for various reasons, but mostly for lust and politics. Jennifer's camera was on me all the time too, even when I slept, especially when I slept, but Walter saw me with his naked eye and he saw everything there was to see in me.

I read The Man Who Saw Everything on an early morning flight nearly two weeks ago, so at this point, I'm recalling more the impression this left me with rather than the specific details, which is good: I didn't know anything about this book before I started it and the intriguing journey of discovery – and this is definitely intriguing – was the most satisfying part of the read. I've read other books by Deborah Levy and found them rich and dense and rewarding. By contrast, The Man Who Saw Everything seems lightweight and crafty, a total departure from what I expect from Levy, but I still found it totally rewarding; appropriate to see on the Man Booker longlist, not exactly surprising that it didn't make the cut for the shortlist. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slightly spoilery beyond.)

A light breeze blew into the GDR, but I knew it came from America. A wind from another time. It brought with it the salt scent of seaweed and oysters. And wool. A child's knitted blanket. Folded over the back of a chair. Time and place all mixed up. Now. Then. There. Here.

As the novel begins, it is 1988 and we meet Saul Adler – a grad student of history about to travel to East Berlin for research – and he is nearly hit by a car on Abbey Road, where he was about to recreate the Beatles' famous album cover as a gift for his German translator's sister. Saul's girlfriend is a photographer and we learn from her that Saul is achingly beautiful – an androgynous beauty with his blue eyes and carved cheekbones and the pearls he wears everywhere – and we learn from Saul that this beauty has long made him an outcast in his own family, with a dead mother, a strongman Bolshevik father, and an older brother who has long attempted to beat masculinity and Socialism into him. Throughout this first section of the book, there are mysterious hints that Saul has premonitions of the future (he tells his translator, Walter, and Walter's sister, Luna, that the Soviet Union will collapse the following year; he is haunted by the spectre of his girlfriend, Jennifer, older and living in America), and although Saul is fluid in his sexuality, he can't seem to find a strong connection with anyone of either gender. 

Without warning, the narrative jumps ahead in the middle of the book to 2016, and Saul Adler narrowly avoids being hit by a car as he crosses Abbey Road. Brought to hospital, Saul somehow believes he is still twenty-eight (as in the earlier timeline) and as he mentally conflates the two accidents, and as various characters from the first half of the book visit him and reminisce, he is exposed as the unreliablest of narrators, and not quite the man we believed him to be. And as tricky as this might feel, it's also totally organic: probably none of us can perfectly align our self-image with how others see us (but hopefully most of us aren't the narcissistic cad that Saul is revealed to be.) 

I placed the palm of my hand on his chest, leaning into him while I got my breath back from the shock of glimpsing that wooden train. One of its wheels, painted red, poked out of Walter's coat pocket. I had seen that train before, or dreamed it, or even buried it, and here it was, returning like a spectre to torment me.

The Man Who Saw Everything is filled with spectres and being haunted by the past (personally and politically); filled with mirrors and cameras and the different perspective allowed by each; it is fluid with gender and sexuality and explodes masculine and feminine roles. It feels a bit like a romp, a mystery, a trail of breadcrumbs through the Black Forest; and while it may not have been deep, exactly, I was glued to the page for my flight, long bemused afterward. Right up my alley.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.