I wrote this review of the Pulitzer Prize Winning All the Light We Cannot See from 3:08 AM to 4:23 AM, right after finishing the book. As you can understand, I was a little emotionally raw and overwhelmed by reading the last 150 pages, so the overall tone is definitely much more complimentary than balanced. I think I’m going to leave it in its raw form, because usually I go in circles going over anything I’ve written to the point where I lose the essence of my voice when I first wrote it. Either way, this is probably not super interesting to most people, but I’m just going to leave this here for my own satisfaction. Enjoy!
Important: Spoilers for All the Light We Cannot See ahead! Proceed with caution.
I’ve thought in the past to try to write reviews in a format where the prose matters, and I do a good job of writing “well”, in a way that befits a blog (or whatever notion of a blog I have), but in these first1 drafts that is the last thing that matters. The feelings and emotions and thoughts that come first to mind are what matter, so here is my stream of consciousness at 3:08 AM on a Tuesday night (into Wednesday) after finishing All The Light We Cannot See.
Right before (purportedly) trying to go to bed, which I think was around 12 o’clock, I was at page 370, I think, but this was the point right after Werner’s troupe members had killed the little girl in the red cape and her mother, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the story. So after a few minutes of not really approaching a point of falling asleep, I picked the book back up and started reading (courtesy of the new reading lamp I conveniently set up today).
I literally couldn’t put it down until I finished. There are so many thoughts in my head I don’t know what to write about first.
The way Doerr writes is simply majestic. He has an incredibly unique voice and style, with punchy sentences that aren’t really sentences. He goes from sequences of sentences that aren’t really sentences but thoughts strung together, punctuated by periods, to paragraph-long descriptions that make you feel like you are on the part of the roller coaster plunging toward the ground with no end in sight. The urgency and the feeling of the characters truly shine through the pages.
The themes the book explores are just so beautiful and speak so strongly to me. Obviously the main one is about war and the way it just rips apart countless lives. There really just isn’t a proper way to describe the absolute nature of its destruction. In the beginning I was so taken by how well the loss of innocence of Werner and Marie-Laure was captured as they encounter the realities of war. But in time the destruction becomes so total, it’s impossible to keep the panic and horror at bay. Again, Doerr’s masterful prose and ability to intersperse callbacks and memories of happier, simpler times make the scarier and horrific realities of the wartime chapters that much worse. You go from Marie-Laure starving and scared for her life in the attic to a memory of her holding her father’s pants walking in the Jardin des Plantes right back to debating whether to open that last can or not. The whiplash gets you good.
The undercurrents of science and learning is another one that particularly made me smile and feel a kindred glow. We start with the pure unadulterated joy of curiosity and learning about the world in Jutta and Werner’s childhood at the Children’s Home in Zollverein. The way Doerr writes about the feeling of electricity running through Werner’s body when he gets that radio working - it’s like he has unlocked a door to a never-ending room full of wonders (think the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter in its secret-keeping state), and I felt like a child again, falling head over heels in love with the world of science and learning how the world around me works. To see this brilliance and love be corrupted as Germany enters wartime and Werner is drafted is so tragic. But other characters share this love of learning in their own ways, and Doerr cruelly takes the joy of watching these characters do what they love away from us. Marie-Laure and her books which take her on journeys that are only amplified with her blindness are separated as she and her father are forced to flee Paris. The moments in those early years in Saint-Malo where she yearns for those tomes made my heart ache for her. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a motif that serves a key role even in the climax, although I feel like there were specific parallels and allusions to that story that I didn’t quite catch, not having read that novel myself. And then there is the unmitigated tragedy of poor, strong-willed Frederick, whose pure love for birds is heartbreakingly taken from him as a result of his courage. Because that’s what happens in Nazi Germany. Again, Doerr knows how to make you almost viscerally feel the pain through Werner’s eyes as he feels helpless seeing his friend torn down again and again beyond the point of no return. Those chapters almost reminded me of the part in The Kite Runner where the narrator (whose name I’ve forgotten) watches Hassan’s life get turned upside down even though he knew what happened and could have said something to save him.
The book also clearly uses the radio pretty thoroughly throughout the story. One of the two quotes that preface the story is one from Joseph Goebbels describing the power of the radio in Nazi Germany’s rise to power. Doerr truly elevates this erstwhile technology into an echelon of feeling almost magical in its ability to unite and connect people. The very same technology opens young Jutta and Werner’s minds to the beauty of learning, but is also used by Werner and Volkheimer’s team to track down and eliminate rebels. The radio is what Madame Manec, Etienne, and Marie-Laure use to fight the good fight, and what Marie-Laure uses to save herself. The reflection in the “2014” chapter of the book really does put into perspective (through one of Doerr’s patented paragraph-long sentences) how much this truly magical technology has become ubiquitous and taken for granted.
Of course, hand in hand comes the ever-present theme of music. I don’t really have much to say on this besides how strongly this resonated with my belief of music truly being the representation of the elevation of humankind beyond that of simple creatures. There is something there that is somehow universal that makes it seem like maybe there is some greater soul that connects us all in ways we can’t quite fathom. I appreciate Claire de Lune in particular being featured heavily, it being one of my favorite classical piano pieces (shout-out Ocean’s Eleven!).
I’m way past my estimated 10 minutes on this piece but I have to give myself a chance to get everything out there.
I’ll admit it took me a bit of time to get fully engrossed in this novel; perhaps I was just distracted and using my free time to do other more pointless things, but the speed with which I read the second half of the novel was much higher than that for the first. I don’t want this to be a criticism of the book, because actually I think one of its strengths is its pacing, and how the timeline structure of the book almost feels like you are accelerating as you approach those fateful days in 1944 where everything comes to a head. Each of the snippets that give you a peek into the “present” (or is it the future?) slowly ramp up the tension in sync with the “flashback” (or is that the present?) chapters as they enter wartime and Marie-Laure and Werner’s lives devolve in their own ways. So as all of our timelines start to converge, you’re in a slingshot and you just can’t stop. In those 40-50 pages of the climax of the story I skipped forward a page or two just to see what would happen, and then forced myself to go back and methodically read sentence by sentence and not miss anything. The story has so much heart and emotion and character and substance even without the throughline of the Sea of Flames diamond that Doerr’s ability to weave that thriller-like storyline into a wartime drama is just immaculate. Even with the timeline jumping back and forth, he drops nuggets and clues that work so perfectly with the way that you read that it’s a masterclass in storytelling. I also have to commend him for how he was able to carry all of the storylines through with such ridiculously short chapters (I’d wager the average chapter length is like 2? 3? pages). It feels like each one is not necessarily a KO punch but a pinch that you don’t quite forget as you’re jumping between the stories.
And now for the real reason this book is so fucking good: the characters. One of the reviews on the back cover by USA Today states “Each and every person in this finely spun assemblage is distinct and true.” And I couldn’t agree more. There is such richness, such texture, such insight into each of the characters in this book that it’s hard not to become completely immersed in Doerr’s world. And really what this book is all about (as with any book that makes me want to write something like this right after) is the relationships that these characters experience.
Let’s start with Marie-Laure, the epitome of sympathy as the bright little girl who loses her sight. My heart aches just thinking about those early chapters and reading how her father truly “made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important”. Ah, if I could even be a fraction of the parent that Daniel LeBlanc is to her daughter I will have done something right. Even after he is carted off as a prisoner thanks to that fucker Claude Levitte, her Papa is always with her; especially when she is trapped in the house in the attic of a shelling with ominous von Rumpel bumbling around below. I wished against all wishes that she would reunite with him, but I guess it was just too much to ask for. I mean, I could literally talk about how beautifully crafted every one of Marie-Laure’s relationships were - with Madame Manec, with Etienne after Madame passes away, those brilliant unforgettable few pages with Werner, I mean, come on. How do you do that, Doerr? As I’m writing this, I’m thinking a bit about how some of these relationships seem almost too pure, almost a little unrealistic - but I think Doerr explicitly chooses to focus on these because literally the rest of the world is a whirlwind of horror and growing entropy and soullessness. So really it doesn’t seem so unrealistic at all that there do exist some shining beacons of light. I guess one theme I didn’t really touch on but am reminded of now is that of the sea - when Marie-Laure’s soul seems like it’s fading and she discovers the ocean (and subsequently the grotto) it’s like the whole world is opened up to her again, the way it did with her books in Paris. Ah, your heart just leaps reading how she feels.
And then we have Werner, whose story (understandably, maybe?) made me cry and sob the most toward the end. There’s something so captivating about this poor, genius, misguided boy’s journey. In Zollverein, with his endless questions (I should’ve realized his notebook was Chekov’s gun and would play a role but I guess I’m not perceptive enough like that) about the world and heady ideas of going off to Berlin and doing amazing science things with the eminent scientists of his time - but where the conflict between duty and what is right (represented by Jutta) takes root when he destroys their radio. In Schulpforta, where this inner conflict just starts to grow and grow as his ambitions take him to greater heights and the doubts rear their ugly head through Frederick’s tragic story. The battle within him as he tries to keep hold of his soul as he is part of Volkheimer’s platoon finally coming to a head when, of all things, he hears that Frenchman’s voice in Saint-Malo. He does the right thing when he gets the chance, and it feels like all of the things that he did because he had to (“It was hard for him not to do what was expected of him,” says Jutta in supposedly broken French) seem forgiven in that moment. When he hears Marie-Laure’s broadcast, trapped in that enclosure with Volkheimer, and every ounce of your body just needs him to break out of there and find him and rescue her? My god, I felt like I was in another world. It’s the hero’s journey that you know is coming, and it pays off in that moment as he faces von Rumpel and gets those blissful few hours with Marie-Laure before the ceasefire. And then that glory comes crashing down so unfairly. Why, Doerr, why? Why did you have to end Werner’s story like that? Why couldn’t everything just end as happily as possible? Because no, even in this tale where the unimaginable is real, everything can’t just work out. And really, as Marie-Laure put it, “is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths?” After all, what else takes that damn duffel bag recovered from the field where he stepped into the mine somehow to Volkheimer, against all odds? And then to Jutta and her new life? And then all the way back to Marie-Laure? How can you say that wasn’t Werner, connecting these people whose lives weren’t their lives anymore after the war? God.
And of course every character gets their own moment in the light. It’s hard for me to capture each one, but I’ll mention a few that are sticking out at this point. Volkheimer truly captured my heart. His introduction as the burly, silent “giant” in the corner of Hauptmann’s office when Werner’s first called there made me think, “Oh boy, this is going to be the brute that provides the juxtaposition with Werner’s intellect,” but boy was I wrong. In the middle of the heartlessness of war, and the baseness of the Neumanns (and Bernd, I think? He seemed more like an NPC), Volkheimer’s fondness for Werner never wavers, not even for a moment. Hearing Werner describe the tenderness with which he held him is just a gut punch like no other. Madame Manec and the fire in her heart that never gave in and carried forward even after she passed away. Sergeant Major von Rumpel and his obsession of jewels that transformed into a desperate bid for survival as his body deteriorated. Jutta and how she represented the good in Werner, his conscience. After her radio silence (sorry) right before his departure from Zollverein, I was worried that the two wouldn’t be in touch at all - but thankfully I was proven wrong.
Thinking of Jutta also takes me to thinking about the end of the book, after the main climax where Marie-Laure and Werner meet for a brief moment in time. I was a bit curious to see how Doerr would fill the remaining pages of the book, but boy does he do an amazing job of tying up the loose ends. As I said above, while Werner himself leaves the world in 1944, he is of course the thread that ties the rest of the characters together almost 30 years later. In following Jutta all these years later we can’t help but notice all the ways in which Werner is even more physically present in Max - the way his ears jut out, his love for making paper airplanes, even the way he asks how tall Volkheimer is.
In some ways, perhaps, the way that these characters’ lives intersect in the final chapters of the story feels almost mystical, almost unbelievable, just like the throughline of the Sea of Flames and its purported curse on any who holds it. But the magic of Doerr’s story is that this mysticality really doesn’t feel forced, or stretched, or overplayed. You know, as do all of the characters in the book (save for von Rumpel in his poor, terminal state), that there is no “curse” on the stone. It’s all just luck. But… is it? What control do we have over this world where entropy is growing relentlessly? Do the forces of good actually have influence in a way that actually make sure we never stop believing? How can you see the world erupt in flame and fire in World War II and not give up hope in humanity? But that’s exactly what Doerr’s story challenges. In a blind girl from Paris, in an orphaned boy from Zollverein, and in all of the people that these two lives touch, is something that is bigger than the sum of its individual parts. It’s something intangible, something you can find in those Braille books, in that little grotto full of life, in the letters from Jutta, in the sound you hear in your headphones traveling through the air from an unknown source, in the seemingly blank and unseeing eyes of Frederick, in that notebook of innocent questions about the world, in the birds that take flight and seem to be the only things that have control over their lives, in that meticulously constructed little house that travels a continent. We may not always be able to see it, but it’s a light that never be extinguished.
Goodnight. 5/5 stars.
P.S. Something I reflected on after I had some time to sleep and calm my emotional state is the variety of interpretations of the “light that we cannot see” — you have the philosophical (perhaps a tad spiritual) interpretation at the end of this review, you have the more scientific perception of the EM waves that are ubiquitous in today’s world2, and you have a description of the world from the perspective of a visually impaired or blind individual (Marie-Laure, in this case). Lots to think about.