All The Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr “All The Light We Cannot See” Scribner, 2014, 530 pp.

A New York Times bestseller novel that puts readers in the mind of a blind French girl, Marie Laure, who lives in Paris and then St. Malo during the invasion by Germany in WWII. Marie lives with her father near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks.  When Marie is six she 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. Again, her father builds a miniature replica of St. Malo for Marie.  With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

The other main character is a German orphan Werner who grows up with his younger sister, fascinated by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an academy for Hitler Youth, and then a special assignment to track the resistance radios. Marie is part of that resistance and their intersection of fate is the compelling part of the book.

 St. Malo was completely destroyed by Allied bombing during the war but has been rebuilt as it once was.  Some years ago I was in St. Malo and had no idea the village I was looking at and admiring for its medieval roots had been entirely reproduced.  I saw a similar restoration in Warsaw but I knew it was a restoration I was looking at.