Review: All the Light We Cannot See [...]
Rating: 4.5 stars
Publisher/ date: Scribner/ May 6, 2014
Word rating: Absolutely gorgeous.
Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.
In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.
Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.
This is one of my all-time favorites.
I'm a total sucker for historical fiction, especially World War II historical fiction, so the book had me at that. The book turns out to be a study in the influence of war, as well as how it effects two completely different people, with some fantasy elements woven in(which I know bothered some people, but I thought worked well); and so overall, a lot to think about in this work.
The prose is beautiful. In Marie-Laure's passages, you can feel everything around her, sense the world the way she senses it rather than sees it. I loved, loved, loved the imagery and descriptions and setting.
It is easy to get to get attached to both Werner and Marie-Laure, and all of the minor characters are also fleshed out interestingly.
A lot of the novel's value lies half with the prose and half with the actual plot. It took me a while to get into the story (I started and put it down about five times before I forced myself to read through more than one chapter at once). When I did get into it, though, I read it through in one sitting.
The book is not without its faults; the time shifts were jarring in several places, and sometimes I rushed through the parts concerning one time period just because I anxiously wanted to know what was happening in the other. But its strengths more than make up for them.
I've read a lot of World War II fiction, and if you enjoy historical fiction like I do, you will definitely see the originality in this novel. It might not be a piece of literary mastery, but it's close, and I will definitely recommend this to anyone who will listen, because it does have a certain haunting sort of charm and staying power.
What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.
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