I
was happy to learn that President Obama picked up a copy of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony
Doerr during his pre-Christmas shopping trip at Politics and Prose bookstore. I
was also glad to hear that Doerr’s novel was a National Book Award finalist and
among The New York Times top 10 list of books for 2014.
Doerr
deserves every one of these accolades—and they are no surprise to me. All the Light We Cannot See is my
favorite book of the year.
I
meant to write about it when I first read it back in May. But honestly, I felt
stymied. It is so dazzling, so beautiful, so heart-rending, I felt inadequate
to write about it. Still do. But I will try, because this big book (510 pages),
10 years in the making, merits all the attention it can get.
What’s
it about? In a tantalizing note on his website, Doerr says it’s about
Radio, propaganda, a cursed diamond, children in Nazi
Germany, puzzles, snails, the Natural History Museum in Paris, courage, fear,
bombs, the magical seaside town of St. Malo in France, and the ways in which
people, against all odds, try to be kind to one another.
On a
more mundane level, the basic story describes the experiences of two children
who grow into adolescence during World War II. Marie Laure is a blind girl who loses her
beloved father, but gains the courage to participate in the French resistance
in the small town of St. Malo. Werner is a German orphan whose brilliance in
building and repairing radios saves him from a brutal life in the coal mines.
Instead, he rockets through a special Nazi-supported school technical school and
soon is deployed as a specialist in triangulating radio transmissions.
The
novel is told mostly from the point of view of these two characters, and short
chapters move back and forth between France and Germany. The narrative pulls
the reader along as wartime developments inevitably bring Marie Laure and
Werner closer together.
As
readers, we care so much about both the main characters, who are fully realized
and appealing. Besides creating memorable characters, Doerr gives us passages
of breathtaking beauty and imbues descriptions of everything from radio
mechanics to mollusks to miniature landscapes with clarity and power.
All the Light We Cannot See is dense and rich and accessible—altogether, a
wonderful book. In fact, I’m planning to re-read it in 2015. I hope you will
like it, too.
