30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 2: All the Light We Cannot See
If yesterday’s Sweetbitter captivated the senses through excess, today’s read—Anthony Doerr’s incredible All the Light We Cannot See does the same, through attention. The novel’s central character, young French girl Marie-Laure, is blind, and her lack of sight enhances her other senses. Marie-Laure pulls us in with her as she explores her world, mostly through touch and sound. We tumble in, wholly engrossed in the story that shifts between dual protagonists, French Marie-Laure and orphaned German Nazi-in-training Werner, in WWII-era Europe.
The story alternates from Marie-Laure and Werner’s perspectives, moving chronologically until their worlds inevitably converge. We begin with Marie-Laure, the best-developed and most lovable character in the story, as a newly blind six-year-old living with her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History, in Paris. To empower his daughter and cultivate her independence, her father creates a to-scale model of their neighborhood, which she memorizes with her fingers. The novel follows Marie-Laure as she grows older, as she and her father are forced to flee Nazi-invaded Paris and move in with her Uncle Etienne in Saint-Malo on the French coast, as her father is arrested by the Nazis, and as Marie-Laure quietly aids the French resistance. Meanwhile, it also focuses on Werner, a budding engineer, who listens to French radio broadcasts about science and ends up at a Nazi School to avoid working in a coal mine.
Though the novel is anchored by its painstaking, bodily descriptions of daily life—both in Marie-Laure’s attentive touching and memorizing and in Werner’s drudgery in the orphanage and corporal discomfort at the Nazi School—it is illuminated by an undercurrent of magical realism that, somehow, never detracts from its credibility. Underpinning the story is the tale of a legendary diamond, known as “The Sea of Flames,” whose owner will never die but whose loved ones will be cursed. Marie-Laure’s father is tasked with the safekeeping of that diamond, which once lived at the Museum of Natural History, and the mystery of its location and ownership lends a thrill to the novel that mirrors the Jules Verne adventure stories Marie-Laure devours with her Braille-literate fingers.
This magic adds a lightness to a story and a subject matter that would otherwise be quite heavy. It gives the story a purpose, leaves clues for the reader, and adds a layer of meaning that transcends the already meaning-heavy issues of human nature, of courage, of friendship and love that weigh down the pages.
This is not a light read, by any means, but it is a magical one.
Rating: 5/5
