Anthony Doerr’s “All The Light We Cannot See” tells the story of a blind French girl and a German boy during World War II in what is described as a “stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel” by the Goodreads summary of the novel.
The full summary states, “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.”
Having read the novel, I have to agree with Goodreads’ descriptor. Both Marie-Laure and Werner were interesting protagonists with very different viewpoints, and throughout the book, I couldn’t wait for their paths to cross throughout the novel because their lives and viewpoints were so very different.
Marie-Laurie Leblanc is in love with books, knowledge and learning about snails, while orphaned Werner Pfennig was motivated by questions, technology and science.
“All the Light We Cannot See” makes for a captivating coming-of-age story for these two characters, but all of the characters in the story grew alongside them.
The mark of a good novel is that even the less important characters have some character change. My favorite side character was Etienne, Marie-Laure’s great-uncle. Ettiene was incredibly flawed after his experiences in the first World War and the death of his brother, but his radio was what ended up bringing Marie-Laure and Werner together.
Etienne’s radio broadcasted a children’s program that he and his brother had worked on before the war, which Werner and his sister had listened to in far away Germany.Marie-Laure’s grandfather. Werner eventually finds Marie-Laure via her radio broadcast of Jules Verne’s “Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” after the Germans overtake Saint-Malo.
Because of Marie-Laure’s blindness, Doerr takes his time writing as much detail into each and every scene, and he even puts in little details that wouldn’t be necessary otherwise, and I loved it. I could easily see this being adapted into a tv series or feature film and being done well.
The only thing I wasn’t in love with about the novel was the diamond subplot. It felt like it had been slid in there without real purpose to me, but it didn’t do very much harm to the story, so I won’t complain about it too much.
This book is long, sitting at about 530 pages, but in my opinion, it is well worth the time I spent reading it, and I rated it four out of five stars.
As Doerr’s first published full-length novel, I will definitely be on the lookout for more from him.