This was a really good book on a lot of levels:
1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict.
2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging.
3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after another make sense and their stylistic construction adds to the story.
4. Good as character fiction. Marie-Laure (sixteen year old blind French girl living in German-occupied France) and Werner (nineteen year old electrical prodigy snapped up by the NAZIs) are very compelling characters.
5. Good as a piece of art, painting us a picture of a specific time and place and people who don’t exist anymore (or never existed) in order to evoke feelings in us as the consumer of said art. For me, it worked best not as a meditation on war or disability or friendship, but as a meditation on the fragility and ephemerality of life on this planet.
6. Good as advertising for visiting Saint-Malo in France (WANT TO GO PLEASE THANK YOU).
So even though it does all of those things listed above very, very well, it didn’t do any of them well enough for me to come away from the book thinking anything more than, “Well, that was pretty good.” And then I returned it to the library.
This wouldn’t be an issue at all, except obviously enough people thought it RULED THE SHIT at doing all those things to give it the Pulitzer. And also, most of my friends who have read have LOST THEIR DAMN MINDS over it. I’m not seeing what exactly about it provokes that kind of response. Maybe I’ve just read too much WWII literature, or maybe the stuff this book is really about is stuff that just doesn’t resonate with me personally.
Whatever the answer to that unanswerable question, this was a good book and definitely worth reading, even if you don’t think it Pulitzer worthy/life-changing/HOLY GOD IN A VOLCANO THAT WAS AMAZING, or whatever.
(Also, the rest of this will be SPOILERS: I didn’t like the way that Werner’s story ended. I found it extremely anti-climactic and unsatisfying, and also it didn’t make sense to me on a plot level. Why did he walk into that minefield? Was he suicidal? Why did we see no evidence of it before, if so? What the fuck? And even before that, I thought the meeting between Marie-Laure and Werner should have been a bigger deal. It wasn’t satisfying for me as is. There should have been more of an interaction between them. We’d been waiting the whole book!)
I started this after being on the waitlist for months at the library, got almost halfway through, and ended up having to return it. What I read was well written and interesting enough, but I have yet to have the urge to revisit it. Although as you said though, so many people have gone bananas for it, and I also have not figured out why.
I’ve been on the waitlist at my library since MARCH. The last book I waited so long for was the Martian (took me seven months of waiting for that one — I’m really too cheap to buy new books) and that rocked my world. I have a feeling this one won’t quite live up to those expectations though.
Nothing is as good as The Martian, certainly not this book. I say give The Martian the Pulitzer for bringing people together over science and saving funny nerds from dying on Mars.
I have been on the waiting list for The Girl on the Train FOREVER also, and I have seen good and bad reviews. We will see!
I put The Girl on the Train on my waitlist back in January, It came in last month and I forgot to go get it. It turns out I clearly wasn’t all that interested in it.
I’m interested to hear what you think of that one once you finally get it.
I had to buy that one because the waiting list was so long and my book club was reading it. Keep in mind the list was already hundreds deep BEFORE the release date, that’s how much buzz this book got. Kind of crazy!
I waited SO LONG on my waiting list as well. It’s definitely worth going back to when you get a chance! The ending was pretty satisfying when it all comes together.
I have never even heard of this book, but I will be trying to work “HOLY GOD IN A VOLCANO THAT WAS AMAZING” into everyday conversation at least once this week.
Yessss. Let’s bring it into mainstream usage! I would love to make like Shakespeare and coin some phrasage.
Ok, so I’m one of those people that rated this 5 stars, but I don’t believe I went “Holy God in a volcano” nuts about it. (I save that kind of tomfoolery for Station Eleven, thank you very much.) This is the definition of a slow burn, though, and that totally works for me.
I agree with all your points, and even mostly the spoilery bit. (SPOILERish chit chat) I think that because Doerr fakes us out (I mean seriously, who didn’t think those two crazy kids were gonna end up together) that’s actually what pushed me to round up from 4.5 as opposed to down. I probably put this on par with The Martian in its affects on me as a reader, but I rounded that one down and this one up. Any other day of the week I may have made the opposite judgement call.
Back when I was moaning and groaning about A Girl is a Half-formed Thing I complained that all I saw was the technique. With this one I remember seeing the technique, but also having the work so obviously put in manifest into a really good reading experience.
SPOILER CHIT CHAT:
You know, I contemplated that they might get together, but I didn’t think it was that kind of book, so I wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t happen. I just really needed MORE from their scenes, though. More conversation, something . . . I just got the feeling once they left each other, like, wait. That was it? And then that whole thing with Werner just didn’t make sense afterwards.
Continued SPOILER CHIT CHAT:
Maybe its all the romance I read? I totally thought we were going there. But then again, I also wasn’t upset about the shortness of their experience. How often do we find the right words when we need them? That seemed to be the gist Doerr was going for. The thing that *really* didn’t work for me were those final couple chapters in present time with Marie-Laure’s daughter and grandson. That seemed tacked on and weird. Random death of a soldier who survives all the other things? Unfortunate par for the course.