Title: All the Light We Cannot See Author: Anthony Doerr
Published: May 6, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 531
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
So this is the big one. Pulitzer prize for fiction, national book award finalist, etc. But, truth be told: All the Light We Cannot See is good, but it’s not excellent. Anthony Doerr’s concept is good, but the book is unwieldy, with a structure that does nothing more than drag things out, and a mystical side-plot that’s entirely unnecessary. Bare bones, this is a good book. But I was relieved when I finished it, and I don’t think I’m likely to think long or hard about anything that happened in these pages.
The novel’s structure, as I said, is not conducive to pleasant reading. Doerr inserts flash-forward interludes that hint at a crisis occurring in the characters’ lives in 1944, but this technique doesn’t add tension or anticipation; rather, it tells you what’s going to happen eventually, so the rest of the book is just the reader waiting until the “present” catches up with that future crisis. Not a smart move, in my opinion. I think the author has already built enough tension in the narrative by having the chapters alternate characters’ perspectives, usually ending on a cliffhanger. That’s a good idea, but spoiling the ending but then forcing the reader to wade through 500 pages to reach that ending is just silly.
Then there’s the entire diamond plotline, which was just not to my taste, and seemed hardly important, considering how magical/mythical it was in tone. Basically, one of the protagonists, Marie-Laure, has a supposedly cursed diamond. It keeps her safe, but brings calamity on everyone else in her life. All the Light We Cannot See plays with this cursed diamond concept ad nauseum, but it seems like pointless fluff. In the end, what purpose did this diamond serve? Nothing. Take it out, and the story is far more streamlined and much more coherent. The deranged Nazi treasure hunter searching for said diamond so as to cure his cancer can be completely cut out—a seriously much-needed revision.
If these two glaring issues could be rectified, I believe All the Light We Cannot See would be much improved. The story at the heart of the matter: two young adults surviving through a war, each in their own ways, is good. I like that story. But Doerr putzes around too much; this book does not need to be any longer than 300 pages—400 at the very most. His writing is effective and clear, though prone to flights of philosophic fancy. It didn’t, technically speaking, really take me that long to read this book, but it felt like such a dragging, meandering slog of a text, and that’s what matters. I love long books, but in this case, I didn’t understand what in the story merited the large page count.
All the Light We Cannot See is good. From a technical standpoint, it needs a lot of work and some slimming down. But the bones of the plot are good, and I didn’t necessarily have fun reading the book, but it wasn’t a wholly onerous task. Is this worth the acclaim it’s gotten? Absolutely not. Any number of 2014 publications are far more deserving. But neither is this terrible. It was a decent read at the very least.
