by Anthony Doerr
2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Reviewed by Cris Wilson
I’m not sure I read a better novel last year than Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See.” Enthrallingly told, beautifully written it is completely unsentimental although one is brought to tears by the beauty and the horror. Doerr’s two protagonists are children who have been engulfed in the horror of World War II. One is Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the blind daughter of the widowed master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Shy but courageous and resourceful, Marie-Laure has learned to navigate the streets of her quartier with the help of a wooden scale-model made by her father. He also sharpens her mind by hiding birthday gifts in intricate puzzle boxes that he carves. He gives her an important gift of 20000 Leagues under the Sea, her first book in Braille.I felt that I understood what it was to be blind as I read the sections about Marie-Laure Werner. The other is Werner Pfennig,an orphan boy in Germany with an untaught understanding of circuitry. When he and his sister Jutta find a broken short-wave radio behind the Children’s Home where they live, Werner repairs it. Turning the dial, they hear a mysterious Frenchman talking about science: “What do we call visible light?” the Frenchman asks. “We call it color. But . . . really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.” Werner is as entranced by this lesson as Marie-Laure is by the writings of Jules Verne. You too will be entranced as you follow the twisting pathways of these two young people navigating through the dangers of WWII.
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