All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - A Review

by Kathleen Barker

How do you choose a book to read?  Many of my friends laugh and tell me they simply pick up the next one in their "to-read" pile or list.  While some ask trusted friends for recommendations, many of us simply hit the "order" button when we read a post or a brilliant review.  While I have my own waiting stack, I recently chose a story because of the awards it had won and the nearly 25 thousand reviews on Amazon, which were overwhelmingly positive.  Indeed, many reviewers were rapturous.

The awards for Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See" are substantial:  2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller.  Despite all of these accolades, there are no guarantees that you will love it. And, let's face it, World War II stories can be weighty and depressing.  Can a story be both depressing and uplifting when it deals with the destruction of so many human beings?  In this case, I only wish that I had more than two thumbs to point upward.

Doerr's novel juxtaposes the story of a six-year-old French girl Marie-Laure who has gone blind with that of Wener, a German orphan with a near-genius understanding of science (particularly electrical engineering)).  For many chapters, we are not sure what one character has to do with the other as both lives are devastated by the Nazi war machine.  Marie-Laure's father is the curator of a museum, and he struggles to protect both his beloved daughter as well as a famous diamond known as the Sea of Flames from Hitler's destructive acquisition.  Werner is swallowed by the Hitler Youth organization as soon as he is old enough.  His genius is recognized and put to brutal use to seek out and destroy the source of broadcasts by the French Resistance.  

As the two characters move slowly to the point where their paths cross, Doerr's prose weaves a stunningly intricate tapestry of metaphor.  His poetic descriptions of feelings, thoughts and surroundings are a literary treasure.  Unlike many novels where we are carried on a juggernaut of action and plot to their inevitable conclusion, this is a story to read slowly - more than once, even - in order to savor its richness.  The author weaves the music of "Clair de Lune", Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the myth of a priceless diamond whose owner will purportedly live forever as long as he possesses it.  The story exudes richness in the midst of war's devastation.

Read it.  Treasure it.  It will make you an instant fan of Anthony Doerr's extraordinary talent.

Buy All the Light We Cannot See at Amazon

Kathleen Barker, features writer. Kathleen was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of Blessed Sacrament, the Institute of Notre Dame and Towson University, she spent twenty years as the much-traveled wife of a Navy pilot and has three children. While working for a Fortune 500 insurance company in New Orleans, she wrote feature and human interest articles for their magazine and received the Field Reporter of the Year award. After Hurricane Katrina, she returned to her beloved state of Maryland where she started work on "The Charm City Chronicles". All four volumes, "Ednor Scardens", "The Body War", "The Hurting Year", and "On Gabriel's Wings" are available in Amazon's Kindle store.

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A Review of Two WWII Novels: The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See

By Alison DeLuca

This year I read two amazing books about World War II: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Lovely and tragic as jewels on a woman killed by gunfire, these books are deadly wonders.

The novels are similar and different at the same time. Both are set in France during WWII. Both feature Germans in sympathetic roles, Hannah and Doerr sidestepping cardboard cut-out characterizations. Both books feature bravery that comes from ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Unsparing in its description of the horrors of everyday life in the midst of wartime, Hannah jumps into her story with French refugees. As the starving families flee their farms and the German army, they in turn spread ruination, the kind that comes from starvation and despair.

Two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, are drawn into the war. Isabelle, a headstrong beauty, goes gladly. Vianne, a married housewife, protests her involvement…yet each will be tested to the utmost.

The daughters of a WWI veteran (whose involvement in the Great War has left terrible scars,) Vianne and Isabelle seem, at first, complete opposites. One accepts the German invasion philosophically, determined to make the best of a bad situation. Vianne is the one running their parents’ house, the one who is married and has a child. Her focus is to keep the house running during the wave of refugees. Her goals are simple: do her teacher’s job and put food on the table.

Isabelle is infuriated by Vianne’s complaceney. She wants to reach out to the refugee families, fight against the Germans, and follow her new love to Paris to become part of the Resistance. A headstrong young girl expelled from several schools, she doesn’t understand fighting the Germans (or even helping refugees) brings its own terrible consequence.

photo courtesy of pixabay

As the war winds on, Isabelle is drawn into helping downed pilots in France but finds Resistance is not as romantic as she thought. As for Vianne, she finds it is impossible to stay completely sheltered from the war.

Hannah doesn’t shy away from the grim face of war or the horrors of torture and starvation. If you like learning about French life during WWII, I highly recommend this book. Once I began, it was nearly impossible to put down – although the writing was fairly standard stuff. This is a Ken Follett-type of novel, where events are so fascinating you have to find out what happens on the next page, but the author doesn’t bother with poetic language. Hannah prose is as straightforward as Vianne herself, although there are times when it sings – during a first kiss, a dreadful parting, or the family ceremony of tying wool on a tree to represent a person or memory.

Buy The Nightingale at Amazon

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Doerr's novel is told with soaring language and endlessly inventive turns of phrase. The story of Marie-Laure, a blind girl left behind in Saint-Malo when her father is brought to prison in Germany. It is also the story of Werner Pfenning, a boy genius with technology and radios who is conscripted into the German army.

And, wonderfully, Light is also a fable of a fabulous diamond called The Sea of Flames. The gem has been cursed and hidden away behind 13 doors in the Natural Museum where M. LeBlanc, Marie-Laure’s father, is a locksmith. Entrusted with the Sea of Flames or perhaps its copy, he takes his daughter to Saint-Malo to escape the invasion of Paris.

This is told in tiny, flashing chapters – each one a gem on its own. I loved the quick pace of the novel, showing tantalizing glimpses of Werner holed up in the Hotel of Bees, Marie-Laure figuring out the puzzles her father makes for her, and the importance of radio during the invasion.

As Marie-Laure learns to read an enormous Braille copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, her father makes an intricate copy of Saint Malo for her so she can touch the streets and learn her way.

photo courtesy of Finda Photo

All the Light We Cannot See unfolds with the amazing properties of radio and how science is both magical and miraculous. Doerr strikes the perfect tone, never too tremulous or overreaching. For example, the episodes of the scientific radio program for children accidentally discovered by Werner and his sister are so lovely they made me breathless:

‘The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children… It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?’

For Marie-Laure, of course, there is no light except that which her father constructs for her by his little puzzles and the amazing toy version of their city. So when he is taken away, she is left in the dark… or is she?

Buy All the Light We Cannot See at Amazon

photo courtesy of pexels

Both All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale ‘come unstuck in time’ like Billy Pilgrim to visit our recent past (in Light’s case, the 1970’s.) As we spend our days reading news items about attacks to citizens and police, why would we turn to novels about further gunfire? Perhaps it’s part of our search to make sense of it all. Both books calmly present their horrors, making them all the worse for the silence in which they’re experienced. And both, in the end, discover the seemingly forbidden gem of humanity among all the bullets.

Both books fascinated and enlightened me. The Nightingale is the more typical type of summer read, so if you’re looking for a poolside or beach volume, it’s a great choice.

All the Light We Cannot See, however, is poetic as well as compelling. In the end, it was my favorite of the two, although I enjoyed The Nightingale as well. Load up your Kindle with these World War II novels before you go away on a summer destination. I can’t think of two more perfect travel companions.

Alison DeLuca is the author of a steampunk series and several other books. She lives with her family in New Jersey, wrestling words and laundry.

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Featured Book: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Goodreads Choice Award Winner 2014: Best Historical Fiction

About the Book

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.

Buy All the Light We Cannot See at Amazon

About the Author

Anthony Doerr is the author of five books, The Shell Collector , About Grace , Memory Wall , Four Seasons in Rome and All the Light We Cannot See . Doerr’s fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the Story Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award, and the Ohioana Book Award three times. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho. Become a fan on Facebook and stay up-to-date on his latest publications.

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