Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
I ... WOW.
It's late when I'm writing this but I have to get this written and posted because oh, my god this book is so amazing and wonderful and good.
This book is amazing in every sense of the word. I really tried to take my time with this book, and this is a book that demands you take your time with. Beautifully written with lyrical prose that makes you ache and makes your eyes leak. Someone said that they could not remember the last time they wept that much when a book reached a conclusion regarding this book, which is something that I now understand. It wasn't just a few tears. It was ugly crying, full on weeping. This book is carefully and thoughtfully written. Author Anthony Doerr chooses his words meticlously.
It would have been so easy to fall into all the tropes that are so common with World War II pieces, such as the evil Nazi commander. But Doerr does away with cliche and stereotype, and makes everyone in this book human. Not dissimilar to The Book Thief, you sympathize with pretty much everybody in this book, and get to see how World War II affected everybody, before, during and after its six-year span. Doerr creates this world masterfully. It is such a captivating book from beginning to end. While it demands you take your time with it, it is not a slow-moving book, rather, one that should be savoured rather than inhaled. I feel like books on World War II are like this on the whole, but this one more so than others because, like The Book Thief, has so much to say about war. The story, in addition, is told in a non-linear fashion, so we know part of the climax of the novel in the opening section, which adds suspense to an already suspenseful story. Doerr employs alternating focuses, between Marie-Laure, Werner, and a Nazi treasure-hunter, which works splendidly for this novel, carrying along the plot and adding many threads that all come together in a powerful way near the conclusion.
The characters are all so well-rounded and compelling. They are the farthest from caricatures you can possibly get. These characters felt so real, and you can really see these people existing in France and Germany. Each character is sympathetic in one way or another, some more than others, and there are no black-and-white characters; even the characters that are the more "villainous" (for lack of a better word) have motivation that is plausible. Having taken an extensive, year-long history course on the everyday people of modern Europe, I know for a fact that these people did exist or could exist. Doerr did his research on the War's affect on people and it paid off, because I can very vividly imagine Marie-Laure and Etienne and Werner existing and living through World War II. These characters are beautiful representations and portrayals of people living during wartime France and Germany.
Doerr's writing style is beautiful and lyrical. As I've mentioned, he takes his time with words. Not in a mundane, boring way, but in a way that makes you pause and think about what he is saying. He spent ten years writing and perfecting this story and he writes it in such a way that even in the less-sad parts, my eyes were pricking with unshed tears. This book is powerful, chilling, haunting and beautifully written. The prose is just wonderful and adds to the book.
All the Light We Cannot See is one of the best books on World War II I have ever had the experience of reading, and I have read a lot of books on World War II and the Holocaust. In focusing on the everyday people of the war, this book adds a lot of context to the time and how trying and difficult it was. I loved everything about this book, and cannot recommend it enough. I give All the Light We Cannot See 5/5.
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