All the Light We Cannot See
Ratings755
Average rating4.2
This is the best book I've read in a while. Engaging story and lyrical prose. I'm recommending it to all my students.
I'm DNFing this at 43%. Maybe I will try again later, but I just have a bad feeling it's going to leave with poor resolution at best or make me depressed at worst and I'm not really here for it right now.
After I read this book I felt like I was channeling my 17 year old daughter when I said “meh”. I like different perspective books, I like time shifts and I admit I can take or leave historical fiction. However, this book was just so so. I didn't dislike it at all, but I didn't feel more then okay about it.
I can understand why a friend of mine placed this book in his all-time favorites! Doerr delivered an excellent multi-perspective WWII story that was profound, heartbreaking, suspenseful and on and on... Witnessing the terrors of Germany while gutted for the quasi innocence of Werner. I really was most fascinated by Werner's path, but Marie's story was compelling and fulfilling in her own way.
Overall a beautiful story that isn't shy about using real-life events that occurred during that period to show how scary and terrifying war is. The only thing I didn't love was how hard it was to keep track of the diverging story lines, especially since I listened to this on Audible. But overall, an excellent story.
I listened to the audio book and I was so drawn into the book I forgot the world for a while. So beautiful and heartbreaking. A complex and dark read.
Wow, awe. I want to watch the show but I saw it's not good ://// I can see why the book won the Pulitzer
Me ha gustado muchísimo, pero creo que si lo hubiese leído en vez de escucharlo, mi experiencia no hubiese sido tan buena. El narrador, Miguel Ángel Jenner, hace un trabajo soberbio, te envuelve con su voz cálida y te guía como un lazarillo por esta historia.
Sin entrar en detalles para evitar spoilers, para mí el tema central de la novela es la pérdida. Todos los personajes pierden algo, diferente para cada uno de ellos,y el cómo enfrentan esa pérdida es lo que conforma el armazón en torno al que se construye el relato.
A modo de reflexión personal, no sé si el libro cuenta una historia que te sume en la tristeza y la desesperanza o es una combinación de lo que cuenta, como lo hace y el momento personal que atraviesa el lector cuando aborda el relato. Entiéndaseme: no es un folletín lacrimógeno, sino que transmite una sensación de tristeza que, a mi modo de ver, lleva a los personajes a un punto en que la esperanza parece no tener cabida. No sé si lo he leído en el mejor momento para mí pero me alegro mucho de haberlo hecho. 5⭐️
nu credeam că o să îmi placă așa de tare, dar ultimele 25 de pagini m-au distrus. vroiam ca între werner și marie-laure să nu fie nici un amor dar când zice volkheimer “a murit în saint-malo. cred că s-a îndrăgostit acolo”, a fost chiar genial mi-o venit să plâng un pic. vreau să o citesc în engleză.
This book is set in Germany and France. It is a dual point book about a german boy and a french girl. Werner the boy has a talent for fixing littary everything and he gets accsepted into a schol where he is trained to be in the third reich.Marie, the french girl is blind. She ‘survives' with the help of books.Obviouslt the war happens and well Marie moves for refugee and blablabla. No need to summerize it all.When first starting to read this book I felt it was hard to be motivated from it. It felt real slow and just tidious to get it moving. The writing style for me seemed almost like a real bad cartrip. The gas is pressed and it rushes in full speed before suddenly it coming to a full stop. Almost like at times, he uses too long on small details I was not really intrsted in. But rushed past intresting stuff.He does howver get some small point for his choices in adjectives and generally discibing. He is goof at making things sound pretty, realistic and just generally a wide language.I was real disepointed in just how little time the two mc got together. I wanted more, way more. I bearly even felt connetcted with them BOTH before they wre seperated again.I did not overall like this book too much honestly. Has to be a 2/5 for me. Only getting a few minor points
i cunt about instalove all the time but wow... why is it in this book? warner sees marie once and somehow loves her? literally never talks to her... just sees her. oh wow i love her. what?
i would like to pretend it was more of a realisation of seeing a blind girl and being like wow these are the people im killing? and he starts to think it over. but thats not what the book says. characters IN the book literally are like “i think he was in love with a girl” like... ok. also oppressor falling in “love” with the oppressed is weird. stop doing it
for a book thats “ten years in the writing” the writing was kind of dog water. sorry. why did i need to do that that one guy has weird bumps on his dick. what the fuck? ok. well. over hyped
A definite 5 star! It took me a little bit to get into it as I found the small chapters and jumping back and forth a little confusing at first. But wow! Such an outstanding story.
Idk man. I couldn't really appreciate the writing style here, I thought the pacing was way too slow and the time jumps were too confusing for me. I also don't really gravitate towards war novels in general because the topic is particularly depressing to me, but I was curious to see what this book would bring to the table, having been fairly popular for so many years. But IDK MAN.
Damn, Doerr!
I read this after loving “Cloud Cuckoo Land” and I almost wish I'd read this first. Doerr's style is so entirely his own. All-in-all, this was terrific.
4 stars because I said so and because CCL was just that much better for me.
This is an absolutely haunting story of two individuals and their lives through WWII.
The flip flop from one character's narrative to the other's is exceptionally well written, drawing you in wanting to find what happens to them.
Another must read!
The thing about this book, this overly-long book, is that it's a kitchen sinker. It has everything you want in An Important Novel: the World War II setting; the big, chunky themes of human connection, heroism, loss, redemption and Good vs. Evil; pathos; profound insights; measured, weighty prose; significance-charged dialogue . . . no wonder it took Anthony Doerr the better part of a decade to complete. It's like he just couldn't stop tinkering with it and, like an obsessed medieval lord, kept adding wings to the castle.
The second thing is that everything about it is vaguely familiar. Wasn't there another book about a precocious young teenaged girl from the second world war? Don't I recall a movie about an obsessive Nazi searching Europe for a precious artefact? Didn't I once read a heartbreaking story about a besieged city, secret communication, brave partisans, doomed soldiers, and an improbable rescue just when all seemed lost? Isn't there a tale about a charmed talisman that simultaneously endangers and protects its holder that the minions of evil are hunting? Like The Barenaked Ladies sang, “It's All Been Done.”
I'm not taking away from Doerr's achievement. It is a very well written, moving novel, and at times I had difficulty putting it down (though possibly that's from the gimmicky and propulsive 2 page chapters). I do enjoy historical fiction, and have a particular fascination with the interwar and World War 2 era. Doerr took a risk in setting his story in World War 2, probably the most written about period in history, to tell this story of human connection and loss. I mean, it has to be tough to find a story that doesn't rely on, well, everything he ultimately relied on, and it has to be even more difficult to catch the imagination of the reader who will wonder what else is there to explore.
In telling the story through the eyes of two children Doerr found his novel approach. Marie-Laure and Werner are paired opposites joined by the light we cannot see. She, blind, lives an auditory existence and he, a brilliant, self-taught radio engineer, develops a range-finding device for the Wehrmacht that allows its users to find hidden radio transmitters (just in case you missed the point, we get a snippet of a lecture by Marie-Laure's haunted great uncle that the electromagnetic spectrum is mostly invisible). Marie-Laure and Werner are further linked by loss and loneliness, and their yearning for human connection. Letters, infrequent and maddeningly censored, are their only tethers to the people they love most dearly, and their lost connections only make their suffering worse. How awful it is, we see, to live in literal and metaphorical darkness. We get to know them the most intimately, so much so that by the time the book ends the rest of the main characters feel more than a little undercooked.
There are moments of great poignance and profundity - the friendship between Werner and Fredrick, the discovery of the secret place under the ramparts, Frank's personal mission in 1974 - and a deeply painful sense of futility and loss as we see how Hitler's megalomania affects the people whose only crime is living in the path of his war machine. And there are moments of great, shocking surprise, horror, dread, and fear that will have you half afraid to turn the page, half afraid not to. Despite its heft, the book does keep you reading.
Overall I have to recommend it if only for the prose. Doerr is a skilled craftsman and many chapters, while short, read like paintings - a frozen landscape here, a Paris street scene there - and the dialogue is naturalistic and spare. People chat, discuss, sometimes expound but, consistent with the themes, they communicate.
While it is overall an enjoyable story, with interesting aspects about how war can affect different people in different ways, it was not a super enjoyable book to read.
I found the subplot about the Sea of Flames completely unnecessary, as well as the final part after the end of the siege.
While the prose is very poetic, there are also a lot of repetitions and at times it was hard to pick up the book as the pace of the events was overly slow.
Oh my god. I am so grateful to have been introduced to this author this year. This book was exquisite. Devastating and beautiful and tender and heartbreaking. I appreciated the honest portrayal of the war from both sides. I loved all that was known and unknown. The characters were all so human and so good.
I wish I could read this for the first time all over again.
At this point in my reading life, I'm no longer shocked when I don't fall head over heels in love with a book that the majority raves about. While I did enjoy All the Light We Cannot See, that enjoyment only came well into the second half of the book.
Mainly following Marie-Laure and Werner Pfennig, the story jumps between different times and places (predominantly during WWII). Marie-Laure is the daughter of a museum worker. When the war hits and France is occupied, the two of them take off to stay with a relative. Things are particularly lonely for Marie-Laure at her uncle's house. She's without her books and trapped inside for a long time given her father's fear for his blind daughter's safety.
Werner's story is far different. Orphaned and living with his sister and mechanically inclined, he eventually is forced to join the Nazis in their fight for the Reich. Though he doesn't think he agrees with what's going on, especially having witnessed the abuse and eventual disablement of a friend in his school days by these same people, denial and looking the other way play a big role in his service.
The stories, of course, eventually intertwine. There are some other points of view scattered throughout providing a different perspective. Another large focus of the book is a diamond that Daniel, Marie-Laure's father, flees with as a slide of hand effort. The legend is that this diamond possesses some sort of magical powers and it is a much sought-after item. This is the part of the book that's left me ambivalent. While the ‘Sea of Flames' is paired nicely with Marie-Laure's love of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I personally don't care much for fantasy elements in historical fiction.
As I already mentioned, I enjoyed the second half of the book much more than the first. The build-up was excruciatingly slow and I finally had to look up some spoilers to see if the rest of the book was going to be worth my time (something I rarely do). Over 500 pages in length and filled with thoughtful prose, this book is an investment. Ultimately, I vote that the time is worth it, but keep in mind that it's very slow-paced. I also need to point out that Anthony Doerr's writing is so lovely. That alone makes for a good reading experience.