All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Overview

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476746586
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	05/06/2014
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	5,670
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)
Lexile:	880L (what's this?)

About the Author

Hometown:

Boise, Idaho

Date of Birth:

October 27, 1973

Place of Birth:

Cleveland, Ohio

Education:

B.A., Bowdoin College, 1995; M.F.A., Bowling Green State University, 1999

Read an Excerpt

All the Light We Cannot See

Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a tall and freckled six-year-old in Paris with rapidly deteriorating eyesight when her father sends her on a children’s tour of the museum where he works. The guide is a hunchbacked old warder hardly taller than a child himself. He raps the tip of his cane against the floor for attention, then leads his dozen charges across the gardens to the galleries.

The children watch engineers use pulleys to lift a fossilized dinosaur femur. They see a stuffed giraffe in a closet, patches of hide wearing off its back. They peer into taxidermists’ drawers full of feathers and talons and glass eyeballs; they flip through two-hundred-year-old herbarium sheets bedecked with orchids and daisies and herbs.

Eventually they climb sixteen steps into the Gallery of Mineralogy. The guide shows them agate from Brazil and violet amethysts and a meteorite on a pedestal that he claims is as ancient as the solar system itself. Then he leads them single file down two twisting staircases and along several corridors and stops outside an iron door with a single keyhole. “End of tour,” he says.

A girl says, “But what’s through there?”

“Behind this door is another locked door, slightly smaller.”

“And what’s behind that?”

“A third locked door, smaller yet.”

“What’s behind that?”

“A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.”

The children lean forward. “And then?”

“Behind the thirteenth door”—the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—“is the Sea of Flames.”

Puzzlement. Fidgeting.

“Come now. You’ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?”

The children shake their heads. Marie-Laure squints up at the naked bulbs strung in three-yard intervals along the ceiling; each sets a rainbow-colored halo rotating in her vision.

The guide hangs his cane on his wrist and rubs his hands together. “It’s a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?”

They nod.

He clears his throat. “Centuries ago, in the place we now call Borneo, a prince plucked a blue stone from a dry riverbed because he thought it was pretty. But on the way back to his palace, the prince was attacked by men on horseback and stabbed in the heart.”

“Stabbed in the heart?”

“Is this true?”

A boy says, “Hush.”

“The thieves stole his rings, his horse, everything. But because the little blue stone was clenched in his fist, they did not discover it. And the dying prince managed to crawl home. Then he fell unconscious for ten days. On the tenth day, to the amazement of his nurses, he sat up, opened his hand, and there was the stone.

“The sultan’s doctors said it was a miracle, that the prince never should have survived such a violent wound. The nurses said the stone must have healing powers. The sultan’s jewelers said something else: they said the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Their most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when he was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water. The sultan had the diamond fitted into a crown for the prince, and it was said that when the young prince sat on his throne and the sun hit him just so, he became so dazzling that visitors could not distinguish his figure from light itself.”

“Are you sure this is true?” asks a girl.

“Hush,” says the boy.

“The stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed the prince was a deity, that as long as he kept the stone, he could not be killed. But something strange began to happen: the longer the prince wore his crown, the worse his luck became. In a month, he lost a brother to drowning and a second brother to snakebite. Within six months, his father died of disease. To make matters even worse, the sultan’s scouts announced that a great army was gathering in the east.

“The prince called together his father’s advisers. All said he should prepare for war, all but one, a priest, who said he’d had a dream. In the dream the Goddess of the Earth told him she’d made the Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea, and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the prince plucked it out, the goddess became enraged. She cursed the stone and whoever kept it.”

Every child leans forward, Marie-Laure along with them.

“The curse was this: the keeper of the stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortunes would fall on all those he loved one after another in unending rain.”

“Live forever?”

“But if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, thereby delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would lift the curse. So the prince, now sultan, thought for three days and three nights and finally decided to keep the stone. It had saved his life; he believed it made him indestructible. He had the tongue cut out of the priest’s mouth.”

“Ouch,” says the youngest boy.

“Big mistake,” says the tallest girl.

“The invaders came,” says the warder, “and destroyed the palace, and killed everyone they found, and the prince was never seen again, and for two hundred years no one heard any more about the Sea of Flames. Some said the stone was recut into many smaller stones; others said the prince still carried the stone, that he was in Japan or Persia, that he was a humble farmer, that he never seemed to grow old.

“And so the stone fell out of history. Until one day, when a French diamond trader, during a trip to the Golconda Mines in India, was shown a massive pear-cut diamond. One hundred and thirty-three carats. Near-perfect clarity. As big as a pigeon’s egg, he wrote, and as blue as the sea, but with a flare of red at its core. He made a casting of the stone and sent it to a gem-crazy duke in Lorraine, warning him of the rumors of a curse. But the duke wanted the diamond very badly. So the trader brought it to Europe, and the duke fitted it into the end of a walking stick and carried it everywhere.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Within a month, the duchess contracted a throat disease. Two of their favorite servants fell off the roof and broke their necks. Then the duke’s only son died in a riding accident. Though everyone said the duke himself had never looked better, he became afraid to go out, afraid to accept visitors. Eventually he was so convinced that his stone was the accursed Sea of Flames that he asked the king to shut it up in his museum on the conditions that it be locked deep inside a specially built vault and the vault not be opened for two hundred years.”

“And?”

“And one hundred and ninety-six years have passed.”

All the children remain quiet a moment. Several do math on their fingers. Then they raise their hands as one. “Can we see it?”

“No.”

“Not even open the first door?”

“No.”

“Have you seen it?”

“I have not.”

“So how do you know it’s really there?”

“You have to believe the story.”

“How much is it worth, Monsieur? Could it buy the Eiffel Tower?”

“A diamond that large and rare could in all likelihood buy five Eiffel Towers.”

Gasps.

“Are all those doors to keep thieves from getting in?”

“Maybe,” the guide says, and winks, “they’re there to keep the curse from getting out.”

The children fall quiet. Two or three take a step back.

Marie-Laure takes off her eyeglasses, and the world goes shapeless. “Why not,” she asks, “just take the diamond and throw it into the sea?”

The warder looks at her. The other children look at her. “When is the last time,” one of the older boys says, “you saw someone throw five Eiffel Towers into the sea?”

There is laughter. Marie-Laure frowns. It is just an iron door with a brass keyhole.

The tour ends and the children disperse and Marie-Laure is reinstalled in the Grand Gallery with her father. He straightens her glasses on her nose and plucks a leaf from her hair. “Did you have fun, ma chérie?”

A little brown house sparrow swoops out of the rafters and lands on the tiles in front of her. Marie-Laure holds out an open palm. The sparrow tilts his head, considering. Then it flaps away.

One month later she is blind.

Editorial Reviews

Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, is set primarily during the Second World War, but it ends in 2014. "Every hour," muses a character on the penultimate page, "someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world." The line offers a poignant reminder that soon, no witnesses will remain to recount what they remember; to an extent we cannot yet measure, novels such as Doerr's will inform how subsequent generations perceive this particular past. Novels can't serve as textbooks, but All the Light We Cannot See imparts an awareness of French and German wartime history that extends beyond the fictional lives of its characters.

Like the architectural models and radio devices that appear throughout the book, the novel is intricately constructed. Some complexity stems from the multiple plotlines: the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a sightless young French girl; that of Werner Pfennig, an orphaned native of Germany's coal country; and, in a tertiary thread, the quest of cancer- stricken Austrian gemologist Reinhold von Rumpel. Additionally, the book interweaves segments set during the August 1944 siege of the French city of Saint-Malo with those depicting the central characters — in France, Germany, and elsewhere — as far back as 1934.

As the Germans advance into France in the spring of 1940, Marie-Laure and her devoted father, Daniel, take part in a mass exodus from their Parisian home. They land in Saint-Malo, on France's northwest coast. There, in a city also soon to fall under German occupation (Saint-Malo is far from what became known as the "free zone," based in Vichy), they take refuge with Marie-Laure's great-uncle. And there, Daniel LeBlanc, previously chief locksmith for France's National Museum of Natural History, constructs a model of the city analogous to one he had made back in Paris to help his daughter navigate her immediate world.

Meanwhile, over in Germany, young Werner evinces remarkable interest in and talent for radio communications. Plucked from the orphans' home in which he and his sister, Jutta, have been living, Werner is placed in an elite Nazi training school. In 1942, when he is just sixteen, he is assigned to a technology division of the Wehrmacht. By August 1944, he, too, is in Saint-Malo. As is the gemologist, whom the war has transformed into a quietly terrifying Nazi sergeant-major immensely proud of his own "unnatural patience."

The novel is so rich — with images, descriptions, characters, and history — that this review could be titled "All the Things We Cannot Detail in 700 Words." An incomplete list: The role of music. The legend attached to a precious jewel. Repeated allusions to Jules Verne's work. Doerr's reliance on the present tense. An extraordinary degree of sensory detail (and not only when it comes to Marie-Laure's perceptions, which by definition exclude the visual). Not to mention the powerful concluding chapters, in which Doerr deftly ties together his narrative threads.

The layers of historical context are given similarly thorough attention. Beyond conventional (if nonetheless still shocking) examples of Nazi cruelty, Doerr conveys less familiar aspects of the war: the lingering trauma of the conflict three decades earlier; the plight of French prisoners languishing in Germany; the Russian military's assaults on German women; the siege of Saint-Malo itself. Meanwhile, the German effort to eradicate European Jewry emerges through subtle yet persistent devices. In general, Doerr doesn't render this history explicitly. Rather, he seems to anticipate the reader's ability to infer the significance of von Rumpel's "Aryan" identifications, a Jewish Berliner's disappearance, and the provenance of the "hundreds of little diamonds, most still in necklaces, bracelets, cuff links, or earrings" stored in "a warehouse outside Lodz."

In the hands of some novelists, the weight of all these elements and details might result in a clumsy final product, but All the Light We Cannot See never loses its artistic way. Anyone who has read Doerr's previous books — the short story volumes The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome — already knows that the man is a prodigiously gifted writer. Anyone who discovers the author through this book will realize it soon enough.

Erika Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories and a former lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University.

Reviewer: Erika Dreifus

Boy meets girl in Anthony Doerr's hauntingly beautiful new book, but the circumstances are as elegantly circuitous as they can be…surprisingly fresh and enveloping…What's unexpected about its impact is that the novel does not regard Europeans' wartime experience in a new way. Instead, Mr. Doerr's nuanced approach concentrates on the choices his characters make and on the souls that have been lost, both living and dead.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

★ 02/17/2014
In 1944, the U.S. Air Force bombed the Nazi-occupied French coastal town of St. Malo. Doerr (Memory Wall) starts his story just before the bombing, then goes back to 1934 to describe two childhoods: those of Werner and Marie-Laure. We meet Werner as a tow-headed German orphan whose math skills earn him a place in an elite Nazi training school—saving him from a life in the mines, but forcing him to continually choose between opportunity and morality. Marie-Laure is blind and grows up in Paris, where her father is a locksmith for the Museum of Natural History, until the fall of Paris forces them to St. Malo, the home of Marie-Laure’s eccentric great-uncle, who, along with his longtime housekeeper, joins the Resistance. Doerr throws in a possibly cursed sapphire and the Nazi gemologist searching for it, and weaves in radio, German propaganda, coded partisan messages, scientific facts, and Jules Verne. Eventually, the bombs fall, and the characters’ paths converge, before diverging in the long aftermath that is the rest of the 20th century. If a book’s success can be measured by its ability to move readers and the number of memorable characters it has, Story Prize–winner Doerr’s novel triumphs on both counts. Along the way, he convinces readers that new stories can still be told about this well-trod period, and that war—despite its desperation, cruelty, and harrowing moral choices—cannot negate the pleasures of the world. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Anthony Doerr writes beautifully… A tour de force.

Deseret Morning News - Elizabeth Reed

Intricate… A meditation on fate, free will, and the way that, in wartime, small choices can have vast consequences.

New Yorker

There is so much in this book. It is difficult to convey the complexity, the detail, the beauty and the brutality of this simple story.

Aspen Daily News - Carole O'Brien

Beautifully written… Soulful and addictive.

The Missourian - Chris Stuckenschneider

Sometimes a novel doesn’t merely transport. It immerses, engulfs, keeps you caught within its words until the very end, when you blink and remember there’s a world beyond the pages. All the Light We Cannot See is such a book… Vibrant, poignant, delicately exquisite. Despite the careful building of time and place (so vivid you fall between the pages), it’s not a story of history; it’s a story of people living history.

Historical Novel Society

Anthony Doerr can find the universe in a grain of sand and write characters I care about with my whole heart.

Karen Russell

Doerr, a fabulous writer, pens an epic novel about a blind French girl and a German boy in occupied France and their struggles to survive World War II.

Seattle Times - Mary Ann Gwinn

This is a beautiful book. Two children, a book-loving blind girl from Paris and a gifted orphan boy from Germany, move in alternate chapters through the 1930s into World War II. After her father’s arrest, Marie-Laure and her great-uncle join the Resistance in Saint-Malo. In 1944, Werner, by now a radio expert, homes in on their secret radio transmissions, and the two teens meet for the only time. Marie-Laure has suffered; Werner has helped inflict suffering but is haunted by doubt. They need each other. The chapters are short; the quick changes in point of view require the reader to hold two worlds in focus, awkwardly at first, then more smoothly as one comes to care about both protagonists. Simple sentences and present-tense narration keep the reader involved. Marie-Laure has sounds, smells, vividly imagined colors, two Verne novels in Braille, and a Breton beach throbbing with sea life to touch. For Werner, the sea off Saint-Malo is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, like a medicine to heal guilt. Only once does Doerr show a personified Death considering which victims to reap, a hallmark of Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (Knopf, 2006/Voya June 2006). Even so, Marie-Laure could easily step into the earlier book to befriend Liesel. Both are resilient, reading novels aloud during air raids, comforting others. Teens in both novels emerge from innocence into Nazi brutality and grope their way to answering the poignant question Marie-Laure asks her great-uncle, “But we are the good guys, aren’t we?” Reviewer: Katherine Noone; Ages 17 to Adult.

VOYA, October 2014 (Vol. 37, No. 4) - Katherine Noone

★ 2014-03-06
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect. In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She's taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure's father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children's House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he's put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she's broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure's father's having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major. Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

Kirkus Reviews