Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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This book didn’t just land on me—it seeped in, slowly, like light filtering through stained glass. At first it felt delicate, almost fragile, but by the time I closed the last page, I realized it had punched me somewhere deep and left an ache I didn’t want to shake off.

What impressed me most of all early on was the manner in which Doerr lets you perceive the world as Marie-Laure does. She is blind, yet, as she and her father chart her small Paris neighborhood, the streets, the textures, the sounds, it did not seem like reading about blindness, it was about learning to see differently. That woody figure her father makes to her, so she can find her way home--God, that scene remained with me. The survival thing was not the point, but the love- the type of silent, patient type of love that creates maps when the world is coming down. I needed to pause reading the book and have a drink of coffee and take a breath, as it brought me back to the fact that the smallest show of care can be greater than any war.

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And then there’s Werner. Another of his curves cut me. This boy, so quick of mind, who heard possibilities in radio waves, who loved to tinker and explore--yet was swept up in the clockwork of Nazi Germany. I was torn to pieces in the scenes of the orphanage. He is this little boy struggling to make ends meet in a world that leaves so little to offer him in terms of choice, and yet you catch glimpses of his salesmanship, particularly with his sister, Jutta. It almost feels like you can sense hope shaking in his hands when he tells her about the radio broadcasts that reach outside their world. It was that opposition--brightness stifled by savage strength--that so struck his story.

The image that remains in my chest is Marie-Laure in Saint-Malo as she reads 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the distorted broadcast Werner is listening to. The city is besieged, the bombs are dropping, everything is collapsing and here are these two souls, as close as two deaf men. That moment felt almost sacred. I remember reading it late at night, and I swear the air in my room felt different—like I could feel the fragile thread of humanity stretching across the ruins.

But the book is not just tragedy. Interspersed are some light humorous and warm touches--the little pleasures of Marie-Laure coming upon seashells, or the mere obstinate resistance her uncle Etienne offers with his secret radio. Those spurts of life in the midst of so much darkness made me laugh a little to myself not because any one of them was funny in the ordinary sense of the word, but because they were true. Doerr was reminding us, as he always did: in war, people remain people--they still joke, they still see beauty, they still devise means of being alive.

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It was a conclusion—the first meeting of Marie-Laure and Werner—which did not provide me with the tidy satisfying closure I was so desperately seeking in my heart, yet perhaps that is why it remained in my mind. Their meeting is not made protracted or sentimental. It is very short, very messy, and very deep. When Werner rescues her, when he decides to be good in a world that had attempted to elicit it of him, it was like a voice in the storm of human events: man may still shimmer in the darkest corners.

And fifty years after Marie-Laure is strolling the streets as an old woman, with memory as the glass shell that a paper airplane tries to keep in the air, I found myself wandering away, thinking about what we are really carrying with us when we are long past the war, the invisible scars, the silent lights that still glowed in us even when we lost so much.

The memory I had in my mind was not the account of two young people trapped during World War II. It is the way Doerr makes you think of light--not as something enormous and glittering, but as something minute and delicate and unobtrusive. The radio waves that you feel but not see. the hand of a father leading you over a street. The short-lived decision to be good, despite all the rest of the world telling you otherwise.

Reading this book felt like sitting in the ruins of something and suddenly finding a flower blooming between the cracks. Painful, beautiful, unforgettable.

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The last three images was gotten from web:

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