‘All the Light We Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr  (2014) – 530 pages

‘All the Light’ has become quite a phenomenon which probably has not been commented on enough.  Who would have expected to see Anthony Doerr on the best seller lists?, but there he is.  Currently the Minneapolis Public Library has a list of 648 people waiting to check out this novel.  It is not often that you have a highly literary writer score such a success.

Now that I’ve read ‘All the Light’ I am ready to analyze this book’s success.  First I want to give you a fine example of the style of the writing.

“What mazes there are in this world, The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models . . . None more complicated than the human brain.”

 This exhilarating observation is from the blind French girl Marie-Laure who is one of the two main characters in the novel.  We meet up with Marie-Laure in the year 1934 at the age of six when she suddenly goes blind.  Her father, the master locksmith at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, builds intricate models of the streets near their home that Marie-Laure can use to find her way around the neighborhood.

The other main character is a German boy, Werner Pfennig, who is about the same age as Marie-Laure.  He develops an interest in radios at an early age due to a scientific broadcast from France hosted by Marie-Laure’s grandfather. His acuity with electronics earns him a scholarship to an elite Nazi school.

Anthony Doerr explains large parts of the surrounding world through these two young intelligent characters.  There is a child-like wonder to the writing which describes the natural miracles around us in short breathtakingly beautiful sentences.  The writing here is exquisite. We even see the severe brutality of the Nazis through the eyes of the child Werner.

Saint-Malo

In 1940, the Germans invade France (thanks to an assist from the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson?), so Marie-Laure and her father flee to the walled seaside city of Saint-Malo.  It is here that Marie-Laure finally meets Werner in 1944 as the Allies land in France and are ready to re-take Saint-Malo.

To what do we attribute the success of ‘All the Light’?  As I’ve said before, the writing about nature is most stunning.  The whole approach of the style and the plot has a child-like clearness.  The plain story has the feel of a folk tale passed down from generation to generation.  Plausibility is not a major consideration.  Credibility is sacrificed for enchantment.

But man or woman cannot live on enchantment alone.  While reading ‘All the Light’, I longed for some world-weary cynicism like you would get from Graham Greene.  Yes, the world is wondrous and a miracle, but there is also a lot of bad stuff in this world starting with the Nazi point of view.  I longed for some dirty realism while reading ‘All the Light’.  I wanted a more complex adult view of things.

Still it is nice to see that a literary novel and Anthony Doerr are making the best seller lists.