All the Light We Cannot See

This is a WWII historical novel, not my usual genre, and it’s occasionally a wonderful thing to read something different. All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015. The writing of Anthony Doerr is elegant. At times I found myself rereading paragraphs, not because I missed the meaning or content, but because I wanted to savor the beauty of his use of English. This is primarily a book about two teenagers, one French girl and one German boy, who grow up under the influence of their countries at war and how that impacts their lives, their families, and their thoughts.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind girl being raised by her father in Paris, and Werner Pfennig is an orphan being raised in Zollverein, Germany, which is in the midst of their coal mining region. Both are remarkable children although one is physically handicapped and the other is most physically unimpressive. The war interrupts their lives in dramatic ways, causes them to be displaced and away from what few family members they have. Marie-Laure’s father was the chief locksmith for the Paris Museum of National History, and as the Nazis were approaching Paris, the museum needed to hide all things valuable, including its Sea of Flame diamond, which is ultimately entrusted to Marie-Laure’s father. The trail of the diamond is pursued by a Nazi Aryan gemologist. But, when Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris and land in an old family estate in Saint-Malo, and that’s where Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne hoards a powerful radio which becomes important to the French resistance movement. The radio is what brings Werner into the picture since he’s a genius with radio technology and mathematics.

It’s obvious fairly early on in the novel that the lives of Werner and Marie-Laure have to connect in some meaningful way, it’s only a question of how Doerr is going to make that happen. This is a beautiful story – and it gets my highest recommendation.