The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
I picked this up on a whim, though I’ve been meaning to read Levy's fiction, and this particular novel is less than 200 pages--which felt like a reasonable commitment after I'd slogged through a few duds. Then-- whoa. I don’t know how to describe the plot, other than to say it takes place in 1988 in Communist East Berlin...but it also--doesn't. This is a narrative about the slipperiness of time and memory and our fundamental inability to access someone else’s inner world; about the narcissism of looking, but also being looked at; and about the complex ways historical trauma shapes our identities and thus our relationships. I took a lot of notes, and had a lot of thoughts, and mostly I loved it.