My Review of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A tragic dance between childhood wonderment and the horrors of war.
After seeing this book dominate the top of all the charts I’m competing in, I had to read it. I’m happy I did. Even though I was left humbled and haunted.
The book is a binary story of two people and two timelines slowly intertwining and converging into an inevitable conclusion, both beautiful and heartbreaking.
The book starts in August 1944 as the Americans are preparing to bomb Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast. This timeline is the climax of the book. The second timeline begins in 1934. It tells the story of how the two protagonists are inexorably drawn to that same place and moment. The book ticks back and forth like the steady beat of a metronome through both characters’ stories and the two timelines until all the threads come together for the conclusion.
She is a freckle-faced blind French girl growing up in Paris. He is an albino, or at least I believe he is by his white hair, who is a German orphan growing up in a coal-mining town in western Germany. They’d both be considered oddities in the most normal of times. But during this time, they are now merely two of the millions of tragic characters in World War II. Both the children are infected with an intellectual curiosity that carries them through the horrors of war with a sense of hope and wonderment. The haunting refrain, “What you could be,” appears throughout the book.
The writing style is light and lyrical. The scenes are impressions, word paintings that convey texture and emotional context as the clues to the plot are revealed. Honestly, I found the style off-putting at first. The use of the present tense always seems gimmicky to me. The short Vonnegut-like segments were jarring and distracting at first. But this only lasted for the first few pages for me as I settled into the rhythm and tone of the book.
Pay attention to the little things along the way. They are threads that make up the fabric of this story. They are like radio waves bouncing off of buildings and growing bigger with echoes that sound throughout the book. The story tightens like the concentric turns of a nautilus, like the namesake of the submarine in the novel that the girl is reading throughout the story or the snail shells she collects. All these things are clues and themes woven into the narrative, historical, and fantastical structure of this book.
You should read it! I think you’ll like it.
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