All the Light We Cannot See: The Breathtaking World Wide Bestseller

I felt as if I was constantly waiting for this novel to get going. Once I gave in to it’s lilting ways and jumps forward and back in time it was more enjoyable. Left with a bit of an empty feeling, maybe that was the author’s intent… to evoke that post war nothingness in his readers. Who knows. Worth a read.

“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... 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.”I’m a sucker for beautiful writing and this is a very beautifully written novel. Doerr always has full imaginative command of his detail and, even if occasionally he feeds too much protein into his sentences, is thus able to evoke his images searingly and poignantly. The novel is a visual delight which is an especially brilliant achievement when you consider he’s often writing about blindness. Doerr’s poetic sentence writing often transfigures the familiar, allowing us to see the natural world afresh. His prose strips us of our own blindness to the beauty in the commonplace. The natural world pervades this novel like a kind of scripture. The goodies are aligned to the natural world; the baddies see it as little more than resources for furthering ambition. This being one of the many fairy tale motifs the novel dramatises. Because it can be read as a fairy tale. There’s a magical stone in the custodianship of Marie Laure’s father, a kind of Wizard (Etienne’s brother who transmits stories over the radio which Werner and his sister listen to as children) and a very clear unwavering distinction between the good guys and the baddies with few grey areas. The innocents are pure. The corrupted are beyond help.All the Light tells the story of Marie Laure who is blind (To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air) and lives in Paris with her father (an idealised character in keeping with the fairy tale subtext of this novel), a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. There, hidden in its vaults for the past 200 years, is an accursed gem, a greyish-blue sea diamond with a red hue at its centre: the Sea of Flame. When war comes Marie Laure and her father will become guardians of this stone. The other central character is Werner. Werner and his sister Jutta are orphans in the German mining town of Zollverein, near Essen in the Ruhr valley, heartland of the Nazi war industry. Werner has a gift of mending things and is especially attracted to radios. At night he and Jutta listen to an enigmatic French man telling stories for children over the radio – “a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.”As straightforward storytelling this novel is ravishing. I liked the short chapters and the flashing back and forwards in time. It reminded me of David Mitchell in its disregard for the perimeters between literary and commercial fiction. Doerr, like Mitchell, romps back and forth between the two camps with great poise and ease.I’m not quite sure what Dave Eggers means when he says Doerr “sets a new standard for what storytelling can do” because there’s nothing groundbreaking about this novel. Like I said it’s straightforward brilliant storytelling. On one occasion Doerr uses a cheap trick, introducing a new POV to crank up tension (an informer who lives near Marie Laure) and then discarding the POV for the rest of the novel but on the whole the artistry of this novel was spellbinding. One of the novel’s themes is guardianship, executed especially well with Werner’s protective but ultimately impotent feelings towards the dreamy Frederick at the bullyboy Nazi college, but shown as a constant facet of the novel’s every relationship. Everyone is guarding some precinct, some stone or calling of the heart. How, above all else, we are all guardians of our own flame which, in the novel, is often seen as our relation to how we use our time and best dramatised through Marie Laure’s great-uncle, the shellshocked Etienne who after WW1 became agoraphobic and never leaves his house until circumstances force him out. This idea is also expressed by Werner – “He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”Transmitters/transmission is another constant theme. The diamond transmits a curse, coal transmits energy, light transmits codes and of course the radio transmits a channel through which Marie Laure and Werner first connect and establish their elective affinity. Doerr creates a world we’re all blind to, a world pulsing with invisible transmitting circuitry. So what began as a clever stroke of emotional manipulation – the positing of a blind girl at the heart of the novel – becomes a tour de force of thematic choreography.Map-making is another theme. Etienne’s broadcasts create a map that unites Werner and Marie Laure. Marie’s father builds her a miniature scaled model of her Paris neighbourhood and then, when they move, a miniature model of Saint-Malo in order that she may feel her way through a perfect replica of her surroundings. Werner is mapping out enemy transmitters during the war. Once again Doerr is exploring the invisible grid that maps out our lives, the light we cannot see.The bitchiness of Carmen Callil’s review in the Guardian was astonishing. Rarely do fellow writers publically ridicule each other in public. Just the opposite. There seems to be a you-pat-my-back-and-I’ll-pat-yours attitude to reviewing so you have to wonder why her review seemed so personally malicious. Often the reviews seemed to have this novel down as a brilliant page-turner but not great literature. I’ve been wondering about this. I adored reading this novel and then perhaps, a day after finishing it, felt maybe I had been somehow tricked into liking it better than it deserves. Does Doerr lack a little subtlety in his emotional manipulation of the reader? If you write a novel about a blind girl with an adoring ideal father and an orphan boy who protects his younger sister you’re obviously going to almost immediately command a great deal of sympathy for your characters. These are the innocents of fairy stories. Also the stalker von Rompel who Doerr makes no attempt to portray as anything but pantomime villain. But all these motifs belong to the fairy story aspect of this novel and within that context are managed well I think. It’s also been said Doerr doesn’t deal with Nazism very convincingly. Is that a valid criticism? The English patient is a WW2 novel and it could be said that doesn’t deal with Nazism very well either. Doesn’t prevent it from being a brilliant thought-provoking novel.“Impossibly, the static coalesces into music. Volkheimer's eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking. They reach the edge of a frozen pond, where a pine grows as tall as a cathedral. His great-grandfather goes to his knees like a penitent, fits the saw into a groove in the bark, and begins to cut.”

A sumptuous read that entwines the reader from the beginning and doesn’t let go. These are characters who engage and entrance.

As it often happens with me, I picked that book at random and what a treat it happened to be! Such a lovely story, sad but beautiful. Very well-written with interesting characters; Second World War and years leading to it shown from the perspective of a young French girl and a German boy which makes the story much more interesting, warmer and less violent than if it was written from men's perspective.If I knew I would love that book so much, I would have definitely bought a hard cover version. Paperbacks tend to have small font and, as I'm using reading glasses, my eyes were getting strained from reading. I wish publishers would stop trying to save money and squeeze as much text on one page as possible, making it difficult to read, and less enjoyable.

thank you x

Although rather too long, this book is poetic in its writing and has a unique style. Highly recommended.

A beautiful book! Loved both stories of the totally amazing French girl Marie Laure and Werner a German boy living through the war. It covered the dark & horrible aspects of the war well. Brilliant characters and so cleverly written in the way that the 2 characters were linked and the 2 stories came together.

A book about waves, radio waves, traveling invisibly towards unknown, unsuspected destinations, making impressions on young psyches, carrying news that can sabotage, educate and and endanger, the magical use of transmitters, receivers, aerials. An impressive amount of research into, background knowledge of, the use of radios during WWII lifts this story onto another level. Also the recounting of events in German occupied St. Malo was fascinating and educational. Crammed with characters who were challenged by the conflict, some of them redeemable and others less so, complexly constructed with time slips/warps from 1934 to the 70's, this is a rich and imaginative work.To 'see' the war through the blind eyes of a French girl in occupied France, and the hopeful ones of a young German boy with exceptional skills, is an an fresh way to mentally inhabit those dangerous, exceptional, times. Themes of incarceration, in cellars, bombed out buildings, attics and ancient crypts were wonderfully written, I really felt I was there with them all the way. Gruesome, bleak and terrible things happen of course, and are coldly described, but the youth of the protagonists made me want them to live, to thrive, and to be happy one day. Kindness warms you when it appears and a new appreciation of good food, a warm bed and a safe roof is kindled. Thinking of one's own children and grandchildren at are the same age as the children we read about, in so awful, unsafe days.I liked the rest of the cast because Anthony Doerr expertly brings them to life, warts and all. Frau Elena, the hard working mistress of the orphanage who cared so for Zollverein mine disaster orphaned Werner, his sister Jutta and her many little charges; Volkheimer the giant boy who stays alongside Werner as they grow up so fast; Frederick, a privileged Hitler Youth school friend who had such a miserable, appalling time, and Great Uncle Etienne who emerges from his post traumatic stress caused by the Great War. Madame Manee who took care of Marie-Laure when she and her father reached St. Malo after their flight from Paris. And what a flight it was (reminding me of Suite Francaise) and what flew with them. The Sea of Flames, maybe, a famous gem that was protected by decoys, hidden and yet in plain sight, a stone that could drive men mad with desire, a diamond that was, in myth anyway, cursed, having unique depths of colour, light and fabulous value. Marie-Laure's father was the Locksmith at The Museum of Natural History in Paris, so was involved in hiding the treasures before the Germans arrived. A devoted father, whose wife had died in the childbirth of his daughter, he was a thoughtful, sensible man who made a whole life possible for her, building little replicas of their environment to teach her to find her way around. This was an invaluable project that paid off. He was a star indeed.However, and a big caveat for me, was that I found the chopping up of the story line to be irritating and disjointed, jerking me in and out of dates and circumstances to a dizzying degree. I felt as though I was knitting the book rather than reading it, dropping a row, picking it up again, casting on and casting off. Back and forth went the extraordinary but parallel lives and destinies of Werner Pfennig and Marie-Laure Le Blanc, I had to replace the scenery(St. Malo, Paris, Germany, Russia) and flick forward and back their and past and future progress, every few pages, Perhaps there could be a straight through version for readers like me who find this distracting!