BOOK REVIEW: 'All the Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr’s novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” is a National Book Award finalist, and with good reason. Doerr has crafted a story that is not only beautifully written, it is tender, suspenseful and thought-provoking.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a young Parisian who, in her first six years, loses both her mother and her sight. Her father, principal locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History, helps her to cope with her blindness by carving an impeccably detailed miniature of her neighborhood. From this miniature, she memorizes streets and landmarks, ultimately enabling herself to navigate her surroundings with confidence.

Marie-Laure’s life with her father is disrupted by the progression of World War II and the Nazi forces bearing down on Paris. On the eve of the Nazi invasion, father and daughter flee the city and seek shelter with Marie-Laure’s great uncle, Etienne, in Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast. Their flight is complicated by a parcel that Marie-Laure’s father secretly carries for his employer, a parcel that is being doggedly pursued by Nazi Sgt. Maj. Reinhold von Rumpel.

In a parallel narrative, Werner Pfennig grows up in a coalmining complex in Zollverein, Germany. Werner is a precocious, mechanically inclined young man who, along with his younger sister, Jutta, is orphaned as a child. As Werner grows, his abilities come to the attention of local government officials. He is sent to the National Political Institute of Education, after which he is given orders to join the Wehrmacht.

“All the Light We Cannot See” does not have romantic themes, per se, but from the beginning, it is clear that Marie-Laure and Werner are on a collision course, pulled together by forces beyond their understanding or control. They each struggle to overcome their own limitations — for her, those limitations that come with her blindness and, more complicated, the protectiveness that her blindness inspires in those who love her; for him, his knowing complicity in the evils that happen around him.

Doerr’s novel reaches a sustained climax when the inevitable Allied liberation of France and von Rumpel’s manic and relentless pursuit converge. The book tends to linger in the chapters leading up to the climax, but with frequent peaks forward into the hours following the onset of the Allied invasion, the plot maintains a steady pace throughout. And Doerr’s prose makes the journey both enjoyable and satisfyingly suspenseful.


“All the Light We Cannot See” is available at Bookstore1Sarasota, 1359 Main St., Sarasota. Call 365-7900 for more information.

Top 10 fiction titles at Bookstore1 this month:
“The Burning Room” by Michael Connelly
“My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante
“All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr
“An Officer and a Spy” by Robert Harris
“City of Thieves” by David Benioff
“Orphan Train” by Christina Baker Kline
“Gray Mountain” by John Grisham
“Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann
“The Mathematician’s Shiva” by Stuart Rojstaczer
“Let Me Be Frank With You” by Richard Ford