All the Light We Cannot See

I am pretty sure that this is the first time I've written a review on Goodreads, but I think that it's time.

I have to say that initially, I had a very hard time getting into this book. I have a hard time reading works that use a lot of descriptive language, and Doerr does just that. It is beautiful, evocative language, but my brain really struggles with it most of the time. But I told myself that with so many stellar ratings, a Pulitzer prize, and all of its critical acclaim, I had to give All the Light We Cannot See a good college try.

I am so glad that I did. I found myself completely enrapt by the characters' nuances, namely main characters Werner and Marie-Laure, but also great-uncle Etienne. The depth that I felt I understood them is unparalleled in many of the books I've read, and I did not expect this from a work set in WWII Europe. I could not stop reading, hoping, quietly wishing for the best for these robust fictional people.

My favorite thing about this entire book, though, is that when I first started reading, I found myself predicting the ending. I read through a lot of the book kind of assuming that a certain thing was going to happen to wrap the story up. I am very pleased to say that this was not what happened at all. To be fair, if my prediction had been correct, I still would've loved the book and rated it highly, but the fact that the predictable finale that I was so sure of was not the case at all gave me faith that good, non-formulaic authors still do exist.

I am so, so very glad that I gave this book a chance. I don't think that I can say that this is my favorite book of all time, but I am now resolute in my decision to not write off historical fiction (as I had been wont to do) and to give the “difficult” books a fair shot. This is a book that we will be reading and raving about for decades to come.

Not something I would normally read but my wife picked it up for me for Valentine's Day. Ended up being an amazing book. Well worth the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded and find myself wanting to read more of this type of book in the future.

Magic. Pure magic.

This book...I'm almost at a loss for words! If you haven't yet read All the Light We Cannot See, it's imperative that you put it on your TBR list this instant.

Anthony Doerr's brilliant and captivating style of writing and story-telling blew me away. I was enthralled with the story and the characters from the moment I started reading, and couldn't put this book down!

The story is a World War II story, but it's so much more than that. It's so deeply human...cares, loves, curiosities, passions, yearnings, growing up. All of this is weaved into the parallel stories of two main characters, Marie-Laure and Werner. One French, one German, both swept up in opposite sides of the war in life-altering ways. Both children, both forced to grow up before they should have. The stories start in parallel, and then you get these expertly crafted wisps of the stories being somehow connected, and you watch as they slowly inch their way toward intersecting.

The way Doerr uses light throughout the book captivated me. It's the visible light that Marie-Laure can only see inside her brain due to her blindness, the creative spark of light inside the minds of children, the way a character near the end turns on all her lights to look as if she's expecting someone, rather then being lonely – all of this and so many more uses of light were just brilliant. If I was still in college and writing a paper on this book, I would have gone all sorts of crazy with post-its and underlining, and it would have been awesome.

Read the rest of this review here: http://www.literaryquicksand.com/2016/02/review-all-the-light-we-cannot-see-by-anthony-doerr/

Enjoyable, but I maybe read this too soon after finishing God in Ruins, because I kept comparing the two in my head, unfavorably to Doerr.

This was a wonderfully written book and it was interesting to see a sombre look at WWII that didn't even really touch on the Holocaust at all.

There were points midway through the book that dragged a bit though, and I thought events ultimately wandered a bit too far into “look what war does to us” territory, but I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I found All the lights we cannot see good, i liked the story and the first time reading it, i read like 200 pages in one sitting, but then i got kind of slow... i dont know, maybe i was in a reading slump, but in all i give 4 stars because it was a well structured story, maybe it kind of got me confused sometimes with the time, i think i would have preferred it a little bit more when it would have been in chronological order. And i would have liked a little more tension, plot twist.

I brought this along to read on a six-hour flight from NYC to San Francisco. When the plane landed, I had just hit the 50% mark and was sorry I hadn't purchased a longer flight: perhaps to France, to Saint-Malo, to wander the streets looking for a little iron gate that led to the sea.

I had to sleep once before I could finish it. I fell asleep with my Kindle in my hands, and my dreams took place within the world of the story: the big house with the spiral staircase running through its center, coiled like a seashell; the boy in the hotel cellar fiddling with the innards of a broken radio, hearing static, then, suddenly, music; Marie-Laure's fingers restlessly exploring the model of the walled city.

This is a book that succeeds on every level. The language is vivid, immersive, astonishing in its ability to draw you into different perspectives. (I particularly loved Marie-Laure's chapters, described exactly the way she experiences the world: in sound, texture, smell, imagined colors – a vast richness, felt with all her senses, the polar opposite of how I had imagined blindness.) It has sentences, metaphors, moments that could stand beautifully alone, yet they combine to form a whole that fits together as neatly as a puzzle box. It's a powerful story that feels both revelatory and intimate, both devastating and inspiring. Both as small and as large as a single lifetime.

This she realises, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

Everyone has misplaced someone.

Il libro col finale più “caccoso” della storia. Davvero, un bellissimo libro, ma con un finale bruttissimo. Maledetto Doerr....

bom, mas nao sei se merecia tanto alarde. Acho q a questao eh q o tema era mto comovente (órfão, mnina cega, Alemanha nazista, ambição) e os temas universais agarraram os leitores.

This story follows 2 children as they grow up and are sucked into world war II. I enjoyed hearing about how they overcame challenges and maintained their goodness despite all the bad things around them. (This book has some strong language)

in Germany, Werner Pfennig is growing up in a mining-town orphanage with his younger sister, Jutta. As Werner grows up, he shows an aptitude for building and repairing radios. Among the broadcasts he and Jutta enjoy listening to on a set he repairs are lectures by a French science professor.

One day, teenage Werner is summoned to the quarters of Herr Siedler, a German officer, to fix the officer's radio. Siedler is grateful to the boy and arranges for him to attend the prestigious National Political Institutes of Education in Essen — a training ground for Hitler Youth. Werner's science skills so impress his teachers that he is recruited to help the Wehrmacht track down sites of illegal transmissions. At first, he is enthusiastic about the assignment, but the sight of a murdered child at a location he helps uncover reveals to him the horror of the German campaign. His belief in the Nazi cause is all but gone when, two months after the Normandy invasion, his unit is told to locate and destroy the source of transmissions coming from Saint-Malo, the “final German strongpoint on the Breton coast.”

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE consists of short chapters, most of them fewer than five pages, the collective impact of which is devastating as Marie-Laure's and Werner's stories converge. The book's title gives you a sense of Doerr's style: formal and elegant, direct yet poetic. He writes gorgeous sentences: “A foot of steel looks as if it has been transformed into warm butter and gouged by the fingers of a child,” “From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.” But the greatest achievement of this book is that, unlike many similar works, Doerr emphasizes his protagonists' capacity for kindness. Of all the brightnesses we can't or don't allow ourselves to see, the capacity for goodness in the face of evil is the brightest of all.

Wordy.

I guess there are people with highly visual imaginations, for whom every extra word is a Pollockian splash adding ever more vivid detail to a cluttered, I mean rich, canvas; people who think rococo “could use a little something.” Turns out I'm not one of those people, which is odd because I used to think I loved well-crafted sentences, and this book is chock full of them, but I also have a fondness for characters and relationships which were in short supply. Although Doerr beautifully describes actions — what is happening — I never felt like I understood the why. The characters were opaque. Affectless. The connections between them flimsy. I think the words crowded out the feels.

Not a good book to read on Kindle: I started compulsively checking the percent meter on every page, despairing at its lack of progress: 80%, still 80%, still, still, still, like that scene in Holy Grail where John Cleese is endlessly running toward the castle but never making progress. Then, mercifully, at 96%, when I still think I have a week to go, it ends! Hallelujah! And that was my favorite part: it ended early.

I think my reading experience of this suffered a bit because I dragged it out over a pretty long period and I ended up kind of forgetting some things along the way? That's on me though.

Anyway, this is beautifully written and has some fresh-feeling perspectives on WWII, which I feel like is kinda tough to do at this point.

Devastatingly beautiful. I wish I could read it again for the first time.

beautifilly written, as if reading an extremelly detailed paint full of dark colours and complicated figures. I've loved every page of this book, so originally written, with such believable characters. It's a painful book, but it's hauntingly gorgeous. I'm so glad I decided to read it.

To, co jsem prožíval kdysi u knihy Zlodějka knih od Zusaka, jsem opět cítil při čtení této knihy. Dojemný a napínavý příběh z druhé světové války, který vás vtáhne a nepustí. Postavy jsou úžasné, a když se ocitnou v nesnázích, toužíte být u nich a pomoc jim. Tenhle styl psaní je mou srdeční záležitostí a doufám, že v brzké době budu mít příležitost si přečíst Anthonyho další díla.

Well, sadly I can only give this book 3.5 stars. I had reaaaalllyyyy high expectations, since it was so hyped up. But my expectations were too high and the book didn't really give me anything. I never really had that moment where I was at the edge of my seat. I really do hope that others can enjoy this book, it is well written but the rest didn't really apply to me.
Anyway, it was still a good book, no doubt about it. But I hoped to get more out of it and just nothing came.

A very well-written story and an interesting story, though the ending was “meh.”

My main complaint is one I have had with recent books; the author's tendency to move the story back and forth in time, sometimes (as it was in this story) to the point of confusion. I understand the use of that for a story mechanism such as in “The Time Traveler's Wife” but could find no such need in this book. There were too many times in this story that something would happen that was almost incomprehensible until you read the flashback 3 or 4 chapters later, almost as if the author had mixed up the order of his chapters.

Still, that is a matter of style and I do not hesitate to give the book a solid rating based on the story, characters and plot.

Very good, and highly interesting. Gives a fascinating insight into the meaning of war and education under such a regime. I found it very good!

What a fabulous read! I've read other stories set during wartime but not one like this. Brilliantly told and one that illustrates the nuttiness of war through two main characters, a young blind French girl and a young German boy. Both are trapped for different reasons; both experience the light we cannot see. It's not often I read a book that resonates like this one. War is more than battles and more than victories and defeats. This is one book I wouldn't mind reading again. Not only for the story but to savor the authors words, his turn of phrase, his take on the human condition. Bravo!

4.5 Stars

“What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.”

I do not know where to begin with this book. The writing in it is absolutely beautiful. Anthony Doerr's prose is amazingly intertwined within the story. This is one of those books that you need to read slowly, so that you can absorb everything within it. When reading books, I tend to mark favorite passages and quotes and I have so many pages marked in this book. There were so many beautiful passages about all different kinds of things and about life.

The main aspect of this book that made it so great for me was definitely the writing, but I also loved the characters. For the most part we follow Marie-Laure and Werner but even beyond them there are so many different stories unfolding throughout this book. Since this book was told in multiple perspectives, I knew at some point all the stories would become intertwined and we would learn about all the connections between the characters. Anthony Doerr surprised me though with the shear number of different connections that were all encompassed within this book. Even the smallest little details had some connection to the overarching story.

The only reason I am not giving this a full five crowns is due to how slow and long it took me to get into the story. That is not to say that I did not enjoy it, but there is a lot of description and time before the plot really picks up. It takes a very long time to introduce the story. Another aspect that was slightly off-putting was the changing timelines. While the book focused on WWII there were jumps in the chapters all falling somewhere between 1941 and 1945 and at times it was confusing after the year changed. However, even though the book was slow, I had no problem reading it because the writing more than made up for the slow aspect. There were times where I had to tell myself to stop reading so I did not rush and could absorb everything I was reading.

This book also ends in a very different way than what I was expecting. I also appreciated how wide open the ending is. It leaves the reading without all the answers but also has a level of finality to it. For someone who does not typically read historical fiction, this was an amazing book. I really enjoyed this book and I cannot recommend it to everyone enough. The writing alone should be enough to at least make you give this book a chance.

Complete french review here !

One hell of a book, really well written (even if it is quite long, the way it's divided between the different people and years is well done and helps getting through it quite quickly), the characters are really lovable, and the story is powerful. A well deserved Pulitzer Price !

Estoy un poco confundida con este libro. Lo quería leer desde hace tiempo, pero no estaba en español. Cuando salió lo pedí en preventa y al llegar lo empecé a los pocos días. Me gusto el inicio y me iba gustando el final, pero tuve problemas con algunas partes en la mitad.

El libro empieza en agosto de 1944 y se va intercalando con hechos ocurridos en el pasado a los protagonistas Marie Laure y Werner, desde 10 años antes hasta llegar a la fecha de 1944. Vemos como poco a poco sus caminos están más cerca de cruzarse.

Marie Laure ha vivido una vida tranquila en Paris, pasando tiempo en el Museo de Historia Natural donde su padre trabaja. Hasta que llega la guerra, obligándolos a salir posiblemente con un tesoro de alto valor y refugiarse en Saint Malo al norte de Francia donde la guerra todavía se ve lejana. Werner es un joven alemán que es un genio con las radios y tiene un gran amor por la ciencia, ha vivido la mayor parte de su vida en un orfanato sin mucho futuro. Otros personajes en la historia son: el papá y tío abuelo de Marie Laure; la hermana de Werner Jutta, así como algunos de sus compañeros militares; y Von Rumpel un nazi en busca de una joya muy valiosa, cuya búsqueda lo lleva a Francia.

Los capítulos son cortos, empieza la narración, pero no hay tanta interacción. Al final no sabía muy bien a dónde íbamos a llegar. Por lo que con la calificación me inclinaba hacia un lado y luego a otro. Me gusta como está escrito, y partes de la historia me parecieron muy interesantes, pero no logró atraparme por completo.

Al final me decidí. Las calificaciones entre 3 y 4 son con las que más conflicto tengo, pero así se queda por el momento y no se va a acabar el mundo.

Though some folks complain that this book kind of ties everything together too neatly, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and found the connections to be interesting. Some of the imagery and themes (a young boy being trained as a nazi, a young woman solving block puzzles) will stay with me.