All the Light We Cannot See

It has been a while...and it’s time to put my money back where my mouth is.

About three weeks ago I finished All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  This novel takes its place on my top-ten-favorite-novels list.  Why, you ask, has it taken me three weeks to write about?  One reason is running my children around and managing their summer activities, but the other is that I went back through the entire novel and wrote down significant passages in my notebook. My instinct upon finishing the novel was to go back through and reread the entire novel, which I will do next summer, but since I had to move on to other books on my summer reading list (about 3/4 the scintillating Sin and Syntax, which, I have to say, helped me pay attention to some of the grammatical structures of Doerr's sentences even more than I might have). 

Where to begin? First, if you have not read this novel, you must.  It should be next on your reading list.  Finish the book you are reading, then pick this one up.  The novel is historical fiction that dips into isolated moments of time in 1934, June 1940, January 1941, August 1942, May 1944, 7-12 August 1944, 1945, 1974, 2014.  Each section (there are 13—I don't think I would call them chapters, although they are numbered) is divided into short titled chapters that capture the moments of one of the several characters that populate this novel.  I am struggling here to adequately describe the novel's structure.  There are two main characters, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig. Marie-Laure is a French girl whose mother died during childbirth, who goes blind when she is six due to congenital cataracts, and is raised by her father, the master of the locks at the Museum of Natural History in Paris; Werner Pfennig is an orphan who, along with his sister Jutta, lives in an orphanage run by the French-speaking Protestant Nun Frau Elena in the Zollverein coal mining complex outside Essen, Germany.  Around Marie-Laure and Werner orbit characters who are connected with one (or both) of these two central characters.  I do not want to say too much as to the intricacies of the connections lest I unravel the beautiful tapestry of this tale.  No doubt you have already taken note of the dates and the ethnicity of the two main characters -- the rise of Hitler, the occupation of France, and the war itself are central to the plot of the novel.

The war, of course, also is central to theme.  And perhaps this is why the novel crept its way into my soul.  Doerr presents complex characters.  Perhaps Marie-Laure is beyond reproach, maybe even Marie-Laure's uncle Etienne's house keeper, Madame Manec, is a moral beacon, Jutta, Etienne, Monsieur LeBlanc...but Werner, who facilitates the murders of several partisans, is sympathetic.  Doerr reveals the way a society like Nazi Germany corrupts through fear and intimidation, and also titillates ambition, and in Werner's case, the desire to escape the colorless life and his father's fate in the mines of Zollverein.  Yet even "the giant" Volkheimer—the assassin—has a complexity that I found myself shocked that I acknowledged.  It is as if he provides the distance that Werner needs/deserves from the role he is playing in the ridding of the resistance radio broadcasts to further Hitler's plan to dominate Europe.  He protects Werner from that harshness, and even before they patrol Poland in the Opel, Volkheimer is a barrier between the more rabid boys at Schulpforta and Werner's mechanically inclined mind.  It is Volkheimer who says, What you could be, which haunts Werner later in August 1944.  And in 1974 when Volkheimer tracks down Jutta to return Werner's belongings from his duffel recently returned from an American POW warehouse, a step he clearly did not have to take, Doerr creates a scene with Volkheimer flying paper airplanes with Jutta's precocious son, Max, who "kneels on the patio in the dusk, going over his airplane, checking the angle of its wings.  Volkheimer kneels beside him, nodding, patient” (504).  In the chapter titled "Volkheimer" in the 1974 section (which parallels a chapter in the August 1942 section), Doerr writes that Volkheimer, "feels loneliness like a disease" and "on winter afternoons he moves among the antennas like a sailor through rigging. In the late blue light, he can watch the people in the streets below hurrying home, and sometimes gulls soar past, white against the dark. The small, secure weight of tools along his belt, the smell of intermittent rain, and the crystalline brilliance of the clouds at dusk: these are the only times Volkheimer feels marginally whole" (499, 498).

Volkheimer was not my favorite character. I was just struck by my own feelings of pity for him and how Doerr presented him wholly, which I admired.

I could go on about this 531-page novel—examining the depth of the characters the moral complexity of many of them. And when I walk away from the novel, I am left with so much hope about humanity.  Although the war, the prison camps, the moral depravity of much of humanity looms in this novel, it is beauty that resonates.  The beauty of thought, actions, life, nature, and even humanity. 

And if I were to go on to trace things like I will ask my AP students to do, there is so much to choose from: snails, spirals, owls/birds, bees, fire, braille (tactile sense in general, I think), life in miniature, light (well, of course), water, names, food, antenna, radio waves, locks, 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea (I should go back and read Alex Gerst's posts on that novel from earlier this year!), chapter titles, the novel's structure, etc.  I do look forward to reading this novel again.

And there are so many passages that I copied into my notebook. He has some amazing labyrinthine sentences that knock me out, but I don't believe I have the patience to type them out.  I do, however, want to provide a sample of some of Doerr's writing:

"The brain is locked in total darkness, says the voice.  It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light.  And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.  It burns with color and movement. So, how, children, does the brain which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? ... Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before the close forever and then a piano comes on playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smoke stacks fallen, and ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility" (48-49).

"The sun burns away the fog and reveals the first blooms on the trees. Werner can feel the fever flickering inside him, a stove with its door latched" (365).

"A great gust of static shears past.  The voice is like something from a long-ago dream" (406).

"She says, 'When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?'" (469).

Along the gravel path boys shout. Someone not far away plays a saxophone. She stops beside an arbor alive with the sound of bees. The sky seems high and far away. Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot.  Not yet.  The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and not parents" (493).

The entirety of the chapter "The Frog Cooks" beginning on 284 and my favorite passage might just be the chapter from the 1974 section "Frederick." I will not write out the entire passage but give you just a taste. This writing raises tears to my eyes for its beauty and truth and, I am trying not to sound pat or cliché, but the entire chapter reminds of the consequences of the kind of violence that gripped Nazi Germany, the complicity of ordinary people, and the interior of human relationships. This, remember, is only a taste:

     "As she sits, looking out through the line of trees into the great empty parking lot, a dark shape sweeps through the nimbus of a streetlamp.  It disappears and then reemerges, and suddenly and silently it lands on the deck railing not six feet away.

     It is an owl. As big as a child.  It swivels its neck and blinks its yellow eyes and in her head roars a single thought: you've come for me.

     Frederick sits up straight"  (522).

I could write so much more. I was enchanted by this novel and going back to copy down passages from dog-eared pages plunged me back in.  I am, however, in need of finishing Sin and Syntax, I have begun Camus's The Plague and will be doing some writing of my own this week at the Antioch Writer's Conference.  You better believe this book will be tucked inside my bag.