All the Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr is an incredible book.  It has won a few awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It is well deserved.  The author has created a story that describes life in France under the occupation of the German Nazis in such a realistic way.  His characters are so believable and the reader can see why people acted and reacted to the war in the many ways they did.  Each character shows a different style of personality and how people could either stand up to the tyrannical leaders that were demanding allegiance to the war effort or were caught up in the war machine and did not know how to break free.

This is the story of two children and their families and how in their parallel worlds their lives are affected by the war.  First there is  Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young girl blinded by cataracts at the age of six.  Her father works for the Museum of Natural History of Paris.  When his daughter becomes blind he spends his time carving replicas of all the buildings in their neighborhood.  Marie-Laure learns how to travel through her neighborhood by touching those models and memorizing their layout.  This is the first literal definition of "light we cannot see".  

In the country, lives Werner Pfennig, a young boy who has been orphaned by the mines that are the mainstay of income for the town.  He and his sister live in the orphanage and he dreams of escaping the life ahead of him in the mines.  The outbreak of war becomes his light out of the tunnel, but he cannot see where it will lead him.  He has a gift of understanding how radios work and while in the orphanage, he and his sister, Jutta, listen to someone broadcasting on the radio late at night in French.   Broadcasting on radio waves, another light that cannot be seen.  The person on the radio talks about the brain's power to create light in the darkness.   about science: “What do we call visible light?” the Frenchman asks. “We call it color. But . . . really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

Doerr creates Werner as such a believable character.  He gives the reader wonderful insight into how a young man could be swayed to follow the army officers directions, building an angry man ready to fight against even an unarmed civilian. The Nazi military commander tells the boys, “You will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. . . . You will eat country and breathe nation.”

 In this way Doerr makes the reader realize how Germans could turn in their Jewish friends and neighbors and how the soldiers in the German army could torture and send so many Jews and others to the concentration camps.

Marie-Laure and her father leave Paris for the small town of Saint Malo on the Brittany coast.  Her father carves her another set of buildings for this small village and gifts her with braille copy of  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Her father is arrested and Marie -Laure shows her true strength of character through her ability to survive in the home of her great uncle and to join the resistance, again learning her way around the town by memorizing the replica her father built her.  

Doerr has built a story here that covers so many of the different situations that were faced throughout the war by people on many different sides of the conflict.  His descriptions are realistic and you become so attached to the characters that you can feel what they are struggling with as they grow and change through out the novel.