So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
- All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr.
Inside the walled island-city of Saint Malo, the war has arrived. We are introduced to two people staying in the same city whose paths, unbeknownst to the reader, are about to cross.
Marie Laure lives in the tall house by the sea where she has with her a miniature diorama of the very city she is within and a jewel of fabled powers. Losing her sight at an early age, the diorama is how she learns to navigate her way around and later become a part of the resistance.
Situated a few streets away from her is Werner Pfennig; a German soldier of extraordinary skill with the radio. Growing up in an orphanage with his sister, Werner dreams of a life bigger than the coal mines he is supposed to work at.
We are soon swept away in the story; navigating the streets of Paris first and later Saint Malo with Marie Laure and listening along with Werner and his sister to the contradicting notes of the beauty of science and the dictator's march towards the war.
Doerr, in his novel, builds for us a world of colour and music and guns and war, of the sea and the stacato of radio and of the electromagnetic waves that transverse with them "eveything anyone could ever feel."
Told in alternating perspectives of Marie Laure and Werner, the book spans over nearly two decades of their lives without a solid chronology. As the story progresses in the present time though, you can feel it leading up to the point when their paths finally intersect. It is a bittersweet moment that the reader knowingly or unkowingly waits for.
Doerr's words are savoury. A lyrical prose that haunts and enchants simultaneously with its tale of the ongoing World War II and the devastations it caused in its wake- the destruction of innocence like fragile birdwings being trampled, boys turned into soldiers and music being replaced by the hum of machine guns.
The author's masterful writing about how the German dictatorship spread its tentacles, the harshness of the soldiers' traning schools and how war can change people and yet how delicate things like music can bring back their lost selves is worth many kudos.
You don't just read the story but you feel every nook and turn of it like Marie Laure feels the words of her braille-books: the effect lingering even after the cover has been shut.
Heart-breakingly beautiful, All The Light We Cannot See is a novel that will shatter you and yet make you cling on to any ray of hope you find for the two protagonists in the story.
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