From the Bookshelf of Bloggers Unite™ …

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

Start date: January 1, 2015

Finish date: January 31, 2015

Discussion: Bloggers Unite Book Club

Why we're reading this: January 2015 - Bloggers Unite Book Club Selection
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What Members Thought

Feb 25, 2016 Shane rated it really liked it

A lyrical, ponderous tome of war and its legacy set in Germany, Paris and around the sea-side fortress town of Saint Malo, alternating between the viewpoints of conqueror and vanquished, where what is clear is that everyone loses in the end.

Marie-Laure is a blind teenager living with her widowed father in Paris, where he is a locksmith for the museum. To provide his daughter her bearings he makes miniatures of the city they live in. He also interests her in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues A lyrical, ponderous tome of war and its legacy set in Germany, Paris and around the sea-side fortress town of Saint Malo, alternating between the viewpoints of conqueror and vanquished, where what is clear is that everyone loses in the end.

Marie-Laure is a blind teenager living with her widowed father in Paris, where he is a locksmith for the museum. To provide his daughter her bearings he makes miniatures of the city they live in. He also interests her in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a metaphor for the principal characters trapped in their surreal world of war with death looming through a window. When the Germans overrun Paris, Marie-Laure and her father escape to live with great-uncle Etienne in the sea-side town of Saint Malo, one of the last bastions in France that was to be liberated by the allies many years later. Her father makes her another miniature, of Saint Malo, but inside this one is hidden an art treasure with a tragic past that people are willing to kill for. Uncle Etienne is a war-damaged recluse who hides out in his house, like Capt Nemo in his submarine, and broadcasts music and philosophy that is appreciated far and wide.

Werner is the German orphan, one of those who as a child had listened to the faraway broadcasts of Uncle Etienne and loved them, who has an aptitude for radio telephony, and who is recruited by the Wermacht to intercept insurgent radio broadcasts so that enemy positions can be eliminated. It is a foregone conclusion that Werner and Marie-Laure will meet on opposite sides of a radio wave, the old fashioned version of our Internet.

The novel is split into two story lines: one leading from 1934 when our protagonists are children and culminating just before Saint Malo is bombed by the allies; the second commencing from the bombing and moving forward with an interlude in 1974 and an epilogue in the 21st century. Both story lines alternate with short chapters narrated in the POVs of Marie-Laure and Werner, with an odd interjectory chapter or two by a wily German Sergeant-Major Von Rumpel who is on the hunt for what is hidden inside the miniature city model. Marie-Laure’s chapters are brilliantly captured with sounds, smells, activities and touch being the means for her to describe her world, while Werner is able to see and show us the moral decay of the Reich about him where the best and the brightest are being raised to devour the weak.

My one negative experience with this beautifully written novel is that it is too long, at over 500 pages. Sometimes we were plodding in the same place for too long. The story lines also blur when one gets to pivotal year, 1944, and we don’t know what elements are in play in each segment.

However, the minutiae of life lived during this period is painstakingly captured and I can imagine that much research and imagination must have gone into it. As for the hidden art treasure, one really doesn’t know what happens to it, for the fog of war descends to cloud the memories of our story tellers. Perhaps, it’s left deceptively out there for a sequel?

A great novel if you want to experience the last days of WWII from the inside and appreciate the things we take for granted today: food, hygiene, love, movement, entertainment. all of which were rationed drastically in those dark days .
...more

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Apr 12, 2015 Harvee Lau rated it it was amazing

The experiences of two young people in WWII - a blind French girl in Brittany and a young German orphan - whose lives are affected by WWII in a dramatic and a suspenseful way.

I could sympathize with the blind girl and read with interest how she went about her days, how she adjusted to being blind but still able to get around and even to solve a mystery and survive the war. Her interactions with the young soldier and his ordeals during war were also riveting.

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Feb 13, 2021 Blodeuedd Finland marked it as dnf

I was bored, so I am moving on

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Oct 09, 2016 Kate added it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

There is so much to love about this novel, especially the way you feel like you are inhabiting the lives and psyches of a blind French girl and a young German soldier. Oddly, the ending doesn't hold up; even the quality of the writing diminishes in the last few chapters. Still, it's definitely worth reading. ...more

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Aug 05, 2020 Kay added it

Wonderfully evoked atmosphere of isolation and longing. Also loved the way the desolation of the young man on the island was treated and the stories he conjured up to keep himself going. I thnk this book told me to always talk about sadness and longing and encourage others the same way.

1 like · Like · see review