Review of All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Set in France and Germany during World War II, Anthony Doerr’s new novel alternates rhythmically between two main characters, a German boy Werner and a French girl Marie-Laure. Each has both handicaps and extraordinary abilities. Werner is an orphan who is a wunderkind with radios and therefore ends up in a German technical unit that tracks resistance radio transmissions. Marie-Laure is blind and yet able to track her way around Paris and Saint-Malo with the aid of scale models built by her doting father. Like Werner, she has a scientific fascination--with shells of all kinds. Werner’s friend Frederick, in turn, is a bird-enthusiast. And Marie-Laure’s father is a master of locks and 3-d puzzles. Finally, a German officer in charge of gathering art treasures for the Third Reich has his own fixation on a particularly large and legendary diamond that involves all of the characters in one way or another. Scientific preoccupations run through this novel, and are, without doubt, a fascination of the author. The novel itself becomes a kind of cabinet of curiosities. This sense is heightened by the author’s habit of making repeated lists: for example, “He oils latches, repairs cabinets, polishes escutcheons. He leads her down hallway after hallway into gallery after gallery…There are carpenters’ shops, taxidermists’ studios, acres of shelves and specimen drawers, whole museums within the museum” (29). The lists give both a sense of repetition and order to the prose, and a sense of depersonalization. In his most poetic passages, Doerr makes a metaphoric leap from science and technology to philosophy, as when he compares the swirling paths of electromagnetic waves to the motions of souls: “And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths?...That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough?” (529) It is these poetic moments, reflecting on the flux and transience of life, that make the novel moving. As if each stone, each blade of grass, each word, each individual life is part of a great mystery unfolding over eons of time. If there is anything flawed in this gem of a novel, it is the way the very short chapters toss the reader back and forth from one character and setting to another, continually breaking the flow of the narrative and making the reader re-adjust their mental lens. This bipolarity eases toward the end, as the stories of the two main characters merge in a climactic finale.



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