REVIEW: All the Light We Cannot See

A novel by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See is a beautifully written book that took the author ten years to finish. It follows the lives of two main protagonists, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young girl in France and Werner Pfennig, a German boy with a genius for electrical engineering as they grow up in the years before and during World War II.

Marie-Laure goes blind at the age of six, and her father teaches her to be self-reliant by building her a miniature model of their neighborhood in Paris. Using this and her father as a guide, she eventually learns to navigate the streets around her home. Her father also builds increasingly complex puzzle boxes each year for her birthday, with a prize waiting inside when she solves it. Marie-Laure also learns braille and is given several books to read, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Despite her blindness, all is well in Marie Laure’s world until the Germans invade France and she and her father are forced out of Paris. They eventually end up in St. Malo, an old fortified city on the coast where they live with relatives. However, even in St. Malo, they cannot escape the German occupation. Food is scarce and her father is arrested, leaving Marie-Laure to be looked after by little known relatives.

Meanwhile, Werner is spending his youth in an orphan’s home in the coalmining town of Zollverein. His days are endlessly mundane, with no hope in sight except for work in the mines. He shows a remarkable aptitude for electrical engineering, even fixing an ancient radio in the house so that the residents can hear news of the outside world. His reputation for fixing things grows until he is asked by a Nazi senior officer to come to his house. His radio is broken and three prior engineers could not fix it. Werner succeeds, which gets him an offer to attend a prestigious school for rising members of the party.

Marie-Laure and Werner are destined to cross paths, and the author is masterful at keeping us in anticipation of how it will happen. As the title suggests, the book explores the theme of light, both seen and unseen. Marie-Laure is blind, yet she says she can still see the world in color but in a different way than we can. Werner deals with the “light” of radio waves and how these can connect people for good and ill. The book is a masterful construction in terms of time and place. It will keep you wanting more until the end. Highly Recommended.

— Reviewed by Mike Nelson, Mount Pleasant Regional Library, Mount Pleasant, SC

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