All the Light We Cannot See<\/em>, by Anthony Doerr, historical fiction around World War II, sounded interesting, so I started reading. \u00a0And it has racked up some major awards, and 26,838 reviews on Amazon, with an average 4.6 out of 5 stars. \u00a0So it\u2019s a Good Book, right?<\/p>\nNow, I\u2019m going to start by admitting that I\u2019m a bit of a dunce when it comes to the \u201clyrical prose\u201d that reviewers of such books rave about. \u00a0I simply don\u2019t get enchanted by these sorts of descriptions. \u00a0And the storytelling device the author chooses, of starting at the War\u2019s end when the characters were in their mid-teens, then backtraking to their early childhood, didn\u2019t really do anything for me.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not what bugged me.<\/p>\n
The story traces the lives of two main characters, Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German Ruhrpott orphan.<\/p>\n
Marie-Laure\u2019s father is the locksmith for the Paris natural history museum, and as the occupation begins, he and Marie-Laure flee to his uncle\u2019s home on the coast, with an enormously large and valuable diamond entrusted to him that carries with it a myth that whoever owns it will never die while those around him suffer untimely deaths. \u00a0The father begins to map out and measure the city in order to construct a model for Marie-Laure, so that she can learn to navigate it, but just after he finishes, he is imprisoned (suspected of sabotage) and sent to a prison camp. \u00a0Subsequently, Marie-Laure, the uncle, and the housekeeper begin working with the resistance, broadcasting\u00a0coded messages from a radio transmitter in the attic of the 6-story house.<\/p>\n
Simultaneously, Werner grows up in the orphanage, using his mechanical skills to rebuild a radio found in the trash, and then using the radio to broaden his universe, first by, in the early Nazi period, listening with his sister to broadcasts of all kinds, including the broadcasts of a Frenchman they call \u201cThe Professor,\u201d about science (he knows French because the woman who runs the orphanage is French), and then listening to forbidden reports of the war itself. \u00a0He is called on to fix the radio of a German military officer\u2019s family, and, his genius observed, invited to a military academy, saving him from a fate of coal-mining, where he experiences the abuse of those institutions but is also mentored by a teacher in whose lab he works at nights. \u00a0 He subsequently angers that teacher, who takes his revenge by claiming that the boy\u2019s birth certificate was falsifed, he really is 18, not 16, and sending him to the front, where he works to identify radio transmissions of partisans.<\/p>\n
Marie-Laure and Werner\u2019s paths cross when he ends up in France, assigned to find the source of the radio transmissions which turn out to be those of Marie-Laure\u2019s uncle; Werner realizes that the sender is the \u201cprofessor\u201d from his childhood, decides to claim he cannot find this transmission, and ends up rescuing her instead, at precisely that instant when she is otherwise about to be killed by the German officer who has come to find the diamond, seeking it out because he is dying of cancer and he hopes it would save his life.<\/p>\n
So far, so good, right? \u00a0Well, if you can buy the idea that Werner by sheer coincidence ends up assigned to track\u00a0down the individual responsible for science broadcasts he listened to as a child, and likewise by coincidence rescues her at exactly that instant when her life is directly in danger. \u00a0And there was a whole bit that I didn\u2019t quite follow in which he and a fellow soldier were trapped in a basement, buried below rubble, for a week or so. \u00a0Early on, they discuss whether they could use a grenade to dislodge the rubble that keeps them from leaving the basement, but the older soldier says, \u201cno, it\u2019ll kill us.\u201d \u00a0Then \u2014 I suppose because he figures that they\u2019ll die either way, so the risk is worth it \u2014 out of nowhere he tosses the grenade, and, a page later, they\u2019re out.<\/p>\n
Honestly, some parts of the book felt a bit hazy to me. \u00a0Rather than painting a crystal-clear picture of what was going on, it was that sort of \u201cI think I can get the gist of it\u201d as when I read German (which I ought to resume, as I\u2019m not sure if I could manage it as well as I could have a decade ago). \u00a0The device of switching back and forth in the time periods contributed to this feeling of haziness, and, look, I\u2019m not a dumb person.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s what left me feeling irritated with the book, in the end: \u00a0there\u2019s enough death and destruction in the world. \u00a0I don\u2019t need to get invested in fictional characters, only to have them die or suffer, not to advance the plot but seemingly, well, \u201cjust because.\u201d<\/p>\n
Werner escapes any pitched battles due to his position in the army; he only sees the dead bodies of partisans afterwards, when he\u2019s told to gather up the equipment they were using for whatever value it might hold. \u00a0He only once sees a shooting, when they\u2019re in an apartment where they think there is a hidden transmitter, and a jumpy nervous soldier shoots a child who was hiding in a closet, who he thought was a partisan. \u00a0But he contracts some unknown illness that means that, at the conclusion of the book, when he is a POW in an infirmary, unable to keep any food down, he delusionally walks into a minefield. \u00a0Boom! \u00a0Dead. \u00a0For no particular reason.<\/p>\n
His younger sister, who shared The Professor\u2019s broadcasts with him and was angry with him when he destroyed the radio, for fear that it\u2019d be discovered, who wrote letters to him expressing such fears about the war that the reader is shown only the \u201ccensored\u201d versions, stays at the orphanage, until, in the last pages of the book, we learn that the orphanage has been emptied out of small children, and she and the older girls and the director are moved to Berlin to work in a factory there, and are subsequently raped by Soviet soldiers. \u00a0There was no reason for this \u2014 it didn\u2019t further the narrative, and I certainly have never read of, in real life, girls and women being moved into<\/em> Berlin. \u00a0My best guess is that the author wanted to work the Soviet rapes into the story in some fashion.<\/p>\nAnd Werner\u2019s best friend at the academy, an upper-middle class boy who is there because he\u2019s \u201csupposed\u201d to be, but actually loves birds more than anything else, is weak and slow, and is also severely nearsighted but has to hide the fact, is bullied and beaten to such a degree that he ends up back at home \u2014 and severely brain damaged, unable to care for himself in any way. \u00a0The author makes sure to let us know that, even years later, in an epilogue, he never recovered and only ever endlessly scribbles on paper, day after day.<\/p>\n
Maire-Laure, at least, has a happy ending \u2014 almost too happy, as if to make up for the fates of the others \u2014 as she becomes highly-educated, teaches and works at the museum, and has a child and then a grandchild. \u00a0And her uncle, too, who had been a recluse after World War I, traveled with her after the war ended.<\/p>\n
So in the end, yes, I stayed up late at night to finish it, but in a \u201clet me just get to the end so I can know what happens\u201d sort of way, not \u201cthis is so magnificent I never want it to end.\u201d \u00a0And now I think I\u2019ve had my dose of fiction for a while, or at least of prize-winning fiction. \u00a0Maybe I\u2019ll see if any of the Star Trek novels my oldest son was reading before leaving on their trip, are still around.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image: \u00a0OK, this is Dresden, not the town in which this book takes place. \u00a0But, eh, World War II.<\/p>\n
Dresden, Teilansicht des zerst\u00f6rten Stadtzentrums \u00fcber die Elbe nach der Neustadt. In der Bildmitte der Neumarkt und die Ruine der Frauenkirche. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 \/ Unknown \/ CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/de\/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Warning! \u00a0Spoilers ahead!) I tried. My kids, the high-schooler and the incoming high-schooler, brought home a couple of the books from which they could choose for their summer reading list. \u00a0One of them, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, historical fiction around World War II, sounded interesting, so I started reading. \u00a0And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":5891,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[153],"class_list":["post-6913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Dresden,](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2017\/01\/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1994-041-07_Dresden_zerst%C3%B6rtes_Stadtzentrum.jpg\")
<\/p>\n