All the Light We Cannot See

At this point in my reading life, I'm no longer shocked when I don't fall head over heels in love with a book that the majority raves about. While I did enjoy All the Light We Cannot See, that enjoyment only came well into the second half of the book.

Mainly following Marie-Laure and Werner Pfennig, the story jumps between different times and places (predominantly during WWII). Marie-Laure is the daughter of a museum worker. When the war hits and France is occupied, the two of them take off to stay with a relative. Things are particularly lonely for Marie-Laure at her uncle's house. She's without her books and trapped inside for a long time given her father's fear for his blind daughter's safety.

Werner's story is far different. Orphaned and living with his sister and mechanically inclined, he eventually is forced to join the Nazis in their fight for the Reich. Though he doesn't think he agrees with what's going on, especially having witnessed the abuse and eventual disablement of a friend in his school days by these same people, denial and looking the other way play a big role in his service.

The stories, of course, eventually intertwine. There are some other points of view scattered throughout providing a different perspective. Another large focus of the book is a diamond that Daniel, Marie-Laure's father, flees with as a slide of hand effort. The legend is that this diamond possesses some sort of magical powers and it is a much sought-after item. This is the part of the book that's left me ambivalent. While the ‘Sea of Flames' is paired nicely with Marie-Laure's love of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I personally don't care much for fantasy elements in historical fiction. 

As I already mentioned, I enjoyed the second half of the book much more than the first. The build-up was excruciatingly slow and I finally had to look up some spoilers to see if the rest of the book was going to be worth my time (something I rarely do). Over 500 pages in length and filled with thoughtful prose, this book is an investment. Ultimately, I vote that the time is worth it, but keep in mind that it's very slow-paced. I also need to point out that Anthony Doerr's writing is so lovely. That alone makes for a good reading experience.

Il libro col finale più “caccoso” della storia. Davvero, un bellissimo libro, ma con un finale bruttissimo. Maledetto Doerr....

I shouldn't like this. Historical fiction set in World War 2 with the obliquely titled “All the Light We Cannot See” featuring a blind French girl?! With George Clooney's Monuments Men, Angelina Jolie's Unbroken and Brad Pitt's Fury it's only a matter of time before Sandra Bullock snatches this up for her own bit of WWII movie relevance.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the blind daughter of master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Werner Pfennig and his sister are orphans in the coal mining town of Zollverein. He's destined for the mines as soon as he turns 15 until his skill at repairing radios gets him a ticket out via a Hitler Youth academy.

Reviewers have found his language overly decorated - “no noun sits upon the page without the decoration of at least one adjective, and sometimes, alas with two or three“ while others complain about the zig zagging timeline that shuttles back and forth over the years and flips between narrators. Screw them. This is one of those books you tell people to just read. It was one of those books I finished and didn't know what to read next, assured that anything else would just be words on a page. Individual results may vary.

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them, before they close forever”

What a journey! What an incredible, heartbreaking, beautiful and bittersweet journey! Poetry disguised as prose - the phrase that comes to mind while reading this book. Strangely, I felt the same while reading The Book Thief, another beautiful story set in those grim years of World War II. What is it about wars that is so fascinating to authors - maybe the atrocities that are committed, the inevitable doom that casts its shadow over both the perpetrators and the victims, or maybe how despite living in the worst of times imaginable to them, people manage to survive but however brave they are, war leaves a black hole in their hearts that can never be filled.

All the characters are incredibly well-written, especially Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who I think is probably the most beautiful character ever written. The disruptive non-linear narration only adds to the beauty where chapters flow into one another forming a giant interwoven web of stories that manage to shake you from the core.

I'll leave you all with a quote from the book -

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

To, co jsem prožíval kdysi u knihy Zlodějka knih od Zusaka, jsem opět cítil při čtení této knihy. Dojemný a napínavý příběh z druhé světové války, který vás vtáhne a nepustí. Postavy jsou úžasné, a když se ocitnou v nesnázích, toužíte být u nich a pomoc jim. Tenhle styl psaní je mou srdeční záležitostí a doufám, že v brzké době budu mít příležitost si přečíst Anthonyho další díla.

This book does a great job of showing you WWII through a different lens. A blind girl and a german orphan, science, and radio transmitters – none of which individually are appealing to me – combined to create a beautiful story.

What a fabulous read! I've read other stories set during wartime but not one like this. Brilliantly told and one that illustrates the nuttiness of war through two main characters, a young blind French girl and a young German boy. Both are trapped for different reasons; both experience the light we cannot see. It's not often I read a book that resonates like this one. War is more than battles and more than victories and defeats. This is one book I wouldn't mind reading again. Not only for the story but to savor the authors words, his turn of phrase, his take on the human condition. Bravo!

Wow, awe. I want to watch the show but I saw it's not good ://// I can see why the book won the Pulitzer

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

All the Light We Cannot See focuses on the events of World War II in Europe, specifically France. The main character is really “the war”... and there are beautifully written, snapshots that capture the true nature of the war and the emotion of those effected by the war. There are 3 storylines going on: (1) A blind girl, Marie Laure, is forced to leave her hometown with her father, the security warden for a museum, who may or may not hold the “Sea of Flames” - the most precious, most cursed, but most powerful stone ever made because the holder is said to be unable to die. (INTRIGUE!!) (2) An orphan Werner, who has a fascination with learning and engineering, specifically re-making radios so that he and his sister can listen to an old man who broadcasts “illegal” educational shows. (2) Sgt von Rumpel who is dying and is searching for the Sea of Flames.

The way that all of these stories tie together in the end is really great! It felt like a true story - the ending actually felt like I was sitting next to a World War II survivor letting them tell their story. So it was very well researched and well written. However, the beginning took me a very long time to get into. I kept reading though because I could tell that this writer is truly talented. Eventually, you start seeing how everything connects and the book is much more readable.

The only thing I disliked was the setup... the book jumps back and forth in time and also jumps from character to character, so it gets confusing. I found myself having to check the dates often. The jumping through time just feels unnecessary and does not add any suspense or glamour to the story. I think it would have been much easier to follow and get into if everything had been in chronological order. But that's just me.

Overall, this is a beautifully written story. I would recommend it... when it starts lagging, just know that it does pick up and the ending is worth it.

Written so well, and really gives a great image of two different lives during WW2. Shows the humanity that can and will prevail when we speak out for our beliefs.

A painful story told beautifully with purpose and resonance. Wondrous.

I can completely understand why this book won the Pulitzer Prize. A very intriguing story that is beautifully written.

Very good, and highly interesting. Gives a fascinating insight into the meaning of war and education under such a regime. I found it very good!

What a great story, and so timely was my reading. Not the way you want things to end, but I did enjoy the ending.

I'm very ashamed to say that i didn't love this book as much as the critics, literally every end of the year list, and my mom said I was supposed to. Maybe I'm just perverse. I really did enjoy the writing style and the two main characters but I never felt like I really engaged with it.
When I found out it took the guy ten years to write, I understood my issue: it's too darn cleanly written. Everything is as perfectly placed as the machinery this guy's so fond of eulogizing. And it pisses me off. I wanted some sort of spark, something that added a weird, unexpected dimension and threw a wrench into these flat little characters, who are all so conveniently obsessed with poetic pursuits.
Also, I just kept thinking of this as like the more political version of the invention of Hugo Cabret and honestly I liked that book better.
I also despise too explicit epilogues; I don't need to know how gross, old, and purposeless my spunky lil characters have gotten.
This is an extremely crabby review and I did actually enjoy this book so I'm giving it a four. But that's mainly so I don't bring down its exceptional rating. Heaven forbid.

There was a lot of this book that I really loved. The characters, the time period, the writing. It kept me flipping pages as the stories intertwined and connections were slowly revealed. However, I did find the ending a bit lacklustre. There was such a build up and although I didn't need a happy ending, it felt somewhat rushed and that the conclusion was a bit...meh. Having said that, I did really enjoy the bulk of it do believe it's worth reading.

Overall a beautiful story that isn't shy about using real-life events that occurred during that period to show how scary and terrifying war is. The only thing I didn't love was how hard it was to keep track of the diverging story lines, especially since I listened to this on Audible. But overall, an excellent story.

A beautifully detailed story set in occupied France and mostly told through the eyes of a blind girl and a boy with big hopes and dreams (and the brain and skills to achieve them) who is forced to become a Hitler youth.  The plot was extremely original for the subject matter, and the characters jumped out of the pages.

I'm DNFing this at 43%. Maybe I will try again later, but I just have a bad feeling it's going to leave with poor resolution at best or make me depressed at worst and I'm not really here for it right now.

“All the Light We Cannot See” is a novel that won the 2014 Goodreads Choice Award for best Historical Fiction and the National Book Award finalist award, and I totally agree that this book deserves those accolades. This novel manages to weave a tale of two people who are connected by change, circumstances, radio communications, and their own humanity into something that had me hooked not only on the characters plight, but also on the language alone. How all these things fit together is best left discovered by the reader,but let me tell you, it was an excellent journey to behold. The amount of detail and description is simply fantastic, and demands to be read slowly and methodically. The plot changes characters and time period to weave a story that never had me lost no matter how long it was since I last picked it up or where I was in the book. Believe me, that is saying something considering how long it took me to read this (over a month and a half).It is also the little things that I like, like how there is a fantastic example of the french resistance in this book, which is something one does not find every day. In conclusion, this book deserves all of the praise it gets. I will read it again, and I will enjoy it even more the second time around. I give it a five, out of five.

The thing about this book, this overly-long book, is that it's a kitchen sinker. It has everything you want in An Important Novel: the World War II setting; the big, chunky themes of human connection, heroism, loss, redemption and Good vs. Evil; pathos; profound insights; measured, weighty prose; significance-charged dialogue . . . no wonder it took Anthony Doerr the better part of a decade to complete. It's like he just couldn't stop tinkering with it and, like an obsessed medieval lord, kept adding wings to the castle.

The second thing is that everything about it is vaguely familiar. Wasn't there another book about a precocious young teenaged girl from the second world war? Don't I recall a movie about an obsessive Nazi searching Europe for a precious artefact? Didn't I once read a heartbreaking story about a besieged city, secret communication, brave partisans, doomed soldiers, and an improbable rescue just when all seemed lost? Isn't there a tale about a charmed talisman that simultaneously endangers and protects its holder that the minions of evil are hunting? Like The Barenaked Ladies sang, “It's All Been Done.”

I'm not taking away from Doerr's achievement. It is a very well written, moving novel, and at times I had difficulty putting it down (though possibly that's from the gimmicky and propulsive 2 page chapters). I do enjoy historical fiction, and have a particular fascination with the interwar and World War 2 era. Doerr took a risk in setting his story in World War 2, probably the most written about period in history, to tell this story of human connection and loss. I mean, it has to be tough to find a story that doesn't rely on, well, everything he ultimately relied on, and it has to be even more difficult to catch the imagination of the reader who will wonder what else is there to explore.

In telling the story through the eyes of two children Doerr found his novel approach. Marie-Laure and Werner are paired opposites joined by the light we cannot see. She, blind, lives an auditory existence and he, a brilliant, self-taught radio engineer, develops a range-finding device for the Wehrmacht that allows its users to find hidden radio transmitters (just in case you missed the point, we get a snippet of a lecture by Marie-Laure's haunted great uncle that the electromagnetic spectrum is mostly invisible). Marie-Laure and Werner are further linked by loss and loneliness, and their yearning for human connection. Letters, infrequent and maddeningly censored, are their only tethers to the people they love most dearly, and their lost connections only make their suffering worse. How awful it is, we see, to live in literal and metaphorical darkness. We get to know them the most intimately, so much so that by the time the book ends the rest of the main characters feel more than a little undercooked.

There are moments of great poignance and profundity - the friendship between Werner and Fredrick, the discovery of the secret place under the ramparts, Frank's personal mission in 1974 - and a deeply painful sense of futility and loss as we see how Hitler's megalomania affects the people whose only crime is living in the path of his war machine. And there are moments of great, shocking surprise, horror, dread, and fear that will have you half afraid to turn the page, half afraid not to. Despite its heft, the book does keep you reading.

Overall I have to recommend it if only for the prose. Doerr is a skilled craftsman and many chapters, while short, read like paintings - a frozen landscape here, a Paris street scene there - and the dialogue is naturalistic and spare. People chat, discuss, sometimes expound but, consistent with the themes, they communicate.

While it is overall an enjoyable story, with interesting aspects about how war can affect different people in different ways, it was not a super enjoyable book to read.
I found the subplot about the Sea of Flames completely unnecessary, as well as the final part after the end of the siege.
While the prose is very poetic, there are also a lot of repetitions and at times it was hard to pick up the book as the pace of the events was overly slow.