Books: All the Light we Cannot See

The masterful novel All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is, on its surface, a story about two pre-teens—one an orphaned German boy with a self-taught gift for building radios and one a blind French girl with a fascination for science and adventure and access to an entire museum of discoveries thanks to her father's job—whose separate worlds slowly collapse around them (and occasionally, tangentially intersect) in the early years of World War II.

The book is filled with imagery and metaphors and cultural references subtle enough that you don't have to get them to be engrossed in the narrative and beautifully relevant enough that they bring deeper meaning—sometimes profound, sometimes merely observational—to the lives of the characters, their changing circumstances, their collapsing worlds, and their dawning understanding of the cruelties and horrors of war.

Those cruelties and horrors of course extend to the Holocaust, which Doerr acknowledges with the most deft touches; Jewish characters pass in and out of scenes long enough to leave an impression and then sometimes disappear many chapters later with a dreadful understanding told in a few sobering, artfully constructed phrases.

The allusions to Light and Seeing in the book's title filter through the narrative in obvious ways (young Marie-Laure's blindness) and in ways that slowly dawn on you (the invisibilities and abstractions of radio signals that engross young Werner). And the metaphor of light—or lack thereof—lingers in the hushed, unspoken evils of Fascism, the sudden disappearances of beloved characters, and the illuminating discoveries of both children on their individual and tacitly shared journeys.

Doerr has a gift for creating characters you find yourself knowing intimately and caring about deeply ... and since they live in the crosshairs of a brutal war, some of their fates will break your heart.

He also trusts his readers to connect the dots between offhand comments, minor characters, historical references and other pieces of ephemera that slowly coalesce into richer understandings of the characters, the themes, the contexts and the worlds they occupy.

The novel is not new and it's been adapted into a Netflix miniseries so you may already be familiar with its general narrative, but I don't want to reveal any more plot details than what I've said here. The first three or four times someone recommended the book to me, the plot summaries they gave honestly didn't grab me. But I'm truly glad I finally listened. I was instantly engrossed in the book, and now that I've finished it I'm finding I miss the characters as though they were friends and family in a long-ago life in a terrifying chapter of our shared history.