All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

In pretty much all of my fiction, and especially in Cloud Cuckoo Land, I like to tinker around with scale, with things-inside-things. A story (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) inside of another story (All the Light); a scale model of Saint-Malo inside the actual town of Saint-Malo; a diamond inside a little house inside a larger house; a story inside of a brain. On the scales of bacteria we are inconceivably large, but on the scales of the universe we are inconceivably small--and yet certain patterns persist at the most microscopic and macroscopic levels. Those resonances across scales are so fascinating and beautiful. For me, there’s something particularly miraculous about reading and writing that reminds me of this: what is a novel, after all, but a little self-contained universe, full of microscale and macroscale patterns, that you get to carry around in your hands?