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A review by angelayoung
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
5.0
To write authentically from the points of view of two children takes courage, much memory of your own childhood and insight, but most of all it takes a writer's ability to find her way inside another person's mind and heart: Anthony Doerr succeeds brilliantly. And his love of literature and words captured me just as they capture Marie-Laure when she learns braille and begins to read Jules Verne's Two Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He writes:
When he writes from Werner's point of view he's just as convincing as he is when he's writing from Marie-Laure's:
You will know that this book is set during the Second World War and so there is much sorrow and horror. But because the lives of these two innocents are so wholly believably depicted at the beginning and because the sea, seawater and the radio play such a part in the story, I read on through the sorrow and the horror keeping my fingers crossed for the two of them ... . I highly recommend you do the same, if you haven't already.
She reads the first half ... [her father gives her the first half for her eleventh birthday. He will save for the second half] ... so many times she practically memorises it. The sea is everything. it covers seven tenths of the globe ... The Sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite. At night, in her bed, she rides in the belly of Captain Nemo's Nautilus, below the gales, while canopies of coral drift overhead.I remember being submerged in fiction just like this, as a child. Doerr also depicts the Marie-Laure's love for her father with great beauty and empathy.
When he writes from Werner's point of view he's just as convincing as he is when he's writing from Marie-Laure's:
Werner repairs a neighbour's sewing machine, the Children's House grandfather clock. He builds a pulley system to wind laundry from the sunshine back indoors and a simple alarm made from a battery, a bell, and wire so that Frau Elena will know if a toddler has wandered outside. He invents a machine to slice carrots: lift a lever, nineteen blades drop, and the carrot falls apart into twenty neat cylinders.And so Werner's future career is set.
One day a neighbour's wireless goes out, and Frau Elena suggests Werner have a look. He unscrews the back plate, wiggles the tubes back and forth. One is not seated properly, and he fits it back into its groove. The radio comes back to life, and the neighbour shrieks with delight
You will know that this book is set during the Second World War and so there is much sorrow and horror. But because the lives of these two innocents are so wholly believably depicted at the beginning and because the sea, seawater and the radio play such a part in the story, I read on through the sorrow and the horror keeping my fingers crossed for the two of them ... . I highly recommend you do the same, if you haven't already.