First things first: the book won
the Pulitzer Prize for Literature last year. And it was the number two best-seller
among The New York Times’ hard-cover
fiction books last week.
So why all the accolades? You will
know by the time you have finished reading the first chapter. It is less than a
page long – a whole chapter, mind you – and you find yourself engulfed in
something that is almost impossible to put down – all 530 pages of it, all
delivered in the same staccato short-chapters. I had dreams about the story. I felt at times as though I
were in it. And I learned from its telling.
Set mostly in Nazi-occupied France
during World War II, All the Light
weaves together the lives of a French girl who has been blind since age six and
Werner, a young German man, conscripted for service to the Führer, and a genius with
radio and electronics.
How they finally meet and relate
and what happens in their lives is the stuff of some of the best writing I have
ever known. It is not what you expect. It is otherworldly – and in more than
just ways of relationship.
There are legends of perfect
diamonds – things the Germans seek to steal and put in what they plan to be the
world’s largest and greatest museum ever.
Meanwhile a patriot they cannot find risks his life to radio
codes – and Shubert’s music – to the Allies forming in England to take on the
Teutonic Übertreibung. And in
the end Doerr has somehow created one of the most beautiful stories of how we
get along in this wretched world by caring for each other.
The book takes concentration, and
all the more – soul, spirit, belief, wonder, and imagination.
It is not for the faint of heart or
the literary gadfly, the seeker of cheap thrills. To them I say: stay with your
dime-novel-equivalent e-books. All the Light is some serious
literature.
It provokes thought – requires it,
really – and is spirit-challenging with unforgettably well-drawn characters.
Meshed with Doerr’s mastery of simile and metaphor, the result is a book that
spoke to my heart. And our spirits are passed along, no matter what.
“And
is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel these paths? ... They
flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt
and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a
library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken every word
transmitted still reverberating within it.”
