All The Light We Cannot See

‘All the Light We Cannot See,’ by Anthony Doerr

This book is full of the rich sentences and structure which so delight me in reading. E.g.

"To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in the shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marches two miles away ... she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth's crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides."

Never a big fan of jumping back and forth between years to weave the fabric of a story; here Doerr does it without bugging to much, I think in part it is by his structure of keeping chapters short, still don't like the technique.  NPR's summation - A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.

The essence of the story is the crossroads built in the experiences of " Marie-Laure (who)grows up (blind) beloved and fortunate; Werner’s life is more grim. He is close to his sister, Jutta, but both are consigned to an orphanage after their father is crushed in a coal mine. For Werner, there truly seems to be no future: The German government decrees that when boys from his region reach their midteens, they must go to work in the mines. But Werner is also a prodigy. Just as Marie-Laure’s father has a genius for creating locks and models, Werner has a way with electrical circuits. He builds a shortwave radio that holds the key to his future." As Germany heads into then deeply emerges itself and France in WWII.

The story is at once compelling  as the author shares the choices his characters make and on the souls that have been lost, both living and dead. At once making the story a quick and driving read - but similarly the sadness of those losses and incredible evil of war. A well written book, which covers war, can not but help but bring a degree of sorrow to me and gratitude that i have not personally  gone to war;  and even more grateful for those who have on my behalf. Even more tragic is the snares an evil world lays for the young teenage protagonists. How society , with its war machine dehumanizes the young Werner ; and survival isn't the clear victory we imagine.

not interested to dive into the title. But I like it on several levels.