All the Light We Cannot See

I am pretty sure that this is the first time I've written a review on Goodreads, but I think that it's time.

I have to say that initially, I had a very hard time getting into this book. I have a hard time reading works that use a lot of descriptive language, and Doerr does just that. It is beautiful, evocative language, but my brain really struggles with it most of the time. But I told myself that with so many stellar ratings, a Pulitzer prize, and all of its critical acclaim, I had to give All the Light We Cannot See a good college try.

I am so glad that I did. I found myself completely enrapt by the characters' nuances, namely main characters Werner and Marie-Laure, but also great-uncle Etienne. The depth that I felt I understood them is unparalleled in many of the books I've read, and I did not expect this from a work set in WWII Europe. I could not stop reading, hoping, quietly wishing for the best for these robust fictional people.

My favorite thing about this entire book, though, is that when I first started reading, I found myself predicting the ending. I read through a lot of the book kind of assuming that a certain thing was going to happen to wrap the story up. I am very pleased to say that this was not what happened at all. To be fair, if my prediction had been correct, I still would've loved the book and rated it highly, but the fact that the predictable finale that I was so sure of was not the case at all gave me faith that good, non-formulaic authors still do exist.

I am so, so very glad that I gave this book a chance. I don't think that I can say that this is my favorite book of all time, but I am now resolute in my decision to not write off historical fiction (as I had been wont to do) and to give the “difficult” books a fair shot. This is a book that we will be reading and raving about for decades to come.

Oh my god. I am so grateful to have been introduced to this author this year. This book was exquisite. Devastating and beautiful and tender and heartbreaking. I appreciated the honest portrayal of the war from both sides. I loved all that was known and unknown. The characters were all so human and so good.

I wish I could read this for the first time all over again.

This Pulitzer prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr has been hugely popular over the past few years and has been on my TBR for some time now. From what I knew about this book I had high hopes that this story of a blind girl in Nazi-occupied France during World War II would be something that would be deeply moving and highly enjoyable.

There are some really great things about this book. Firstly our two main characters are both hugely likeable and tell us very different stories about life on different sides of the war. Firstly we follow Marie-Laure who has been blind from an early age, with her father the head of security at the Natural History Museum in Paris they find themselves fleeing Paris when it is occupied by the German's. On the other side, we follow Werner, a German orphan with an aptitude for radios who finds himself saught by Hitler Youth because of his skills and thrown into a world he finds difficult to reconcile himself with. Whilst the main story is told from their point of view Doerrr gives us some really wonderful and well fleshed out side characters such as Marie-Laure's Uncle Etienne and Werner's friend from school Frederik. They are characters you sympathise with and want to succeed. Being a World War II story the risk for everyone is always high and this means emotionally you are engaged and fearful for them throughout. Mainly we alternate back and forth between chapters from Marie-Laure's and Werner's perspectives throughout the timeline of the war. The chapters are very short, generally, only a few pages and this means you tend to fly through the narrative quite quickly and find yourself engaged very early on in the story.

For me though, there was something just not quite there with this book. I think it was the fact that for 85% of this book our two main characters sit in complete isolation to one another. Their stories are independent and don't really intertwine. We are hopeful that they will intercept at some point but we are not sure about when they will and whether the meeting will be a positive one for all involved. I felt a little bit unmoved when they did meet, it was all over a little too quickly and didn't provide that gut-wrenching emotion I wanted to have after investing so much in the rest of the book. I wanted it to be epic, this is a Pulitzer prize winner after all, it must be amazing. Right? It just wasn't. It was only just okay. It was like waiting throughout the whole book for a pay off you just knew must be coming and then finding yourself shortchanged.

This book had huge promise, it had a brilliant historical landscape with which to work and at times Doerr makes magnificent use of this to tell very moving stories about life during the war for both those who were occupied and the German boys who found themselves thrust into war. I just needed his characters to meet a little sooner and for their meeting to have the same emotional pull as the rest of the book. For that reason, I'm only giving this one 3 out of 5 stars. It was a good book but I thought I'd rave about it after and to be honest, it was only okay for me.

I always feel particularly silly writing reviews for books that win awards like, ya know, the Pulitzer. Let's just say I agree with the selection committee's wisdom. Really moving historical fiction that feels painfully salient in today's political climate (even more so than when it was published in 2014), and I especially enjoyed its unusual combination of poignancy and urgency. A very quick read I didn't want to have end.

What a heart-wrenching and beautifully written book! The author spent ten years on this story, and you can tell. I was skeptical about this book from the beginning, because although I enjoy historical fiction, I feel that WWII can be overdone, and the concept of a French-German relationship during the war did not appeal to me as an original story. However, I couldn't have been more wrong about the book.
It is impossible not to empathize with the two main characters, and the development of the secondary characters was just as gripping. I personally fell in love with Frederick, a young Nazi who struggles to fit in.
Probably one of the novel's strongest traits is how it portrays Nazi soldiers as more than just goons. The other fascinating feature was the beauty and depth of description used to portray the perspective of the blind girl. The way the cities and houses are described make you almost feel like you are blind.
For all its description and depth, it does not drag at any point. The book is written in short chapters with a back-and-forth timeline that forces you to want to read more. Furthermore it is written over a back-story of fantasy and folk-lore, with a deep underlying symbolism, which gave the plot far more life than one usually gets from a historical piece.
I hold back on giving it a perfect score because despite how well-written the characters are, the main ones can feel too perfect, and though the story was deep and powerful, it did not impact me in the same way others stories have. All in all though, it was a beautiful story.

Wordy.

I guess there are people with highly visual imaginations, for whom every extra word is a Pollockian splash adding ever more vivid detail to a cluttered, I mean rich, canvas; people who think rococo “could use a little something.” Turns out I'm not one of those people, which is odd because I used to think I loved well-crafted sentences, and this book is chock full of them, but I also have a fondness for characters and relationships which were in short supply. Although Doerr beautifully describes actions — what is happening — I never felt like I understood the why. The characters were opaque. Affectless. The connections between them flimsy. I think the words crowded out the feels.

Not a good book to read on Kindle: I started compulsively checking the percent meter on every page, despairing at its lack of progress: 80%, still 80%, still, still, still, like that scene in Holy Grail where John Cleese is endlessly running toward the castle but never making progress. Then, mercifully, at 96%, when I still think I have a week to go, it ends! Hallelujah! And that was my favorite part: it ended early.

in Germany, Werner Pfennig is growing up in a mining-town orphanage with his younger sister, Jutta. As Werner grows up, he shows an aptitude for building and repairing radios. Among the broadcasts he and Jutta enjoy listening to on a set he repairs are lectures by a French science professor.

One day, teenage Werner is summoned to the quarters of Herr Siedler, a German officer, to fix the officer's radio. Siedler is grateful to the boy and arranges for him to attend the prestigious National Political Institutes of Education in Essen — a training ground for Hitler Youth. Werner's science skills so impress his teachers that he is recruited to help the Wehrmacht track down sites of illegal transmissions. At first, he is enthusiastic about the assignment, but the sight of a murdered child at a location he helps uncover reveals to him the horror of the German campaign. His belief in the Nazi cause is all but gone when, two months after the Normandy invasion, his unit is told to locate and destroy the source of transmissions coming from Saint-Malo, the “final German strongpoint on the Breton coast.”

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE consists of short chapters, most of them fewer than five pages, the collective impact of which is devastating as Marie-Laure's and Werner's stories converge. The book's title gives you a sense of Doerr's style: formal and elegant, direct yet poetic. He writes gorgeous sentences: “A foot of steel looks as if it has been transformed into warm butter and gouged by the fingers of a child,” “From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.” But the greatest achievement of this book is that, unlike many similar works, Doerr emphasizes his protagonists' capacity for kindness. Of all the brightnesses we can't or don't allow ourselves to see, the capacity for goodness in the face of evil is the brightest of all.

My favorite WW2 book since Atonement; does the “mixed-timeline historical fiction” genre very well; excellent sense of scientific wonder in the dawn of the radio era.

Hard to describe how many times I stopped reading to say, “That's a gorgeous paragraph.” I don't understand the few critiques I've heard that “nothing happens,” because I was racing to the end to discover the plot arc.

Pretty as a picture, highly recommended