I am reluctant to share the plot details of All the Light We Cannot See for fear of spoiling the experience that is unspooling this beautiful novel. This is a dual narrative, switching back and forth between a young man in Germany and a young woman in France during WWII. Werner, a brilliant orphan with hair as white as schnee, is a radio-repairing engineering genius who finds himself in the German army while Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, flees occupied Paris with her beloved father […]
A really good read, but I don’t get all the fuss.
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 […]
A Long Tale of Sight, Sound, and War
Let’s get this out of the way: All The Light is a long book. 531 pages long. This is the second longest book I’ve read this year (the winner of that award is still Afterwords) and man, it felt it. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book; it’s beautiful and visual and broken up into mostly short chapters of just a few pages, but it. is. long. Towards the end, this turned into a book that I was reading just to get through it, not […]
Not as Illuminating as the Title Would Suggest
Marie-Laure is a blind Parisian girl whose father works at the Museum of Natural History. When she goes blind at age 6, her father builds a to-scale model of their neighborhood so she can learn her way around gradually. Then the Nazis occupy Paris. They flee to Saint-Malo, where they find refuge with extended relatives, Madame Manec and shell-shocked Etienne. Oh, and Marie-Laure’s father carries a jewel with him that may or may not be magical but is most certainly valuable, which is sought tirelessly by a German jeweler, von Rumpel. Meanwhile, […]