"The candle rolls gently. Toward the window. Toward the curtains."
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Anthony Doerr
There is some heart-stoppingly gorgeous writing in this book, some scenes laid out with brain-breaking brilliance. The language manages to be languid and searing. The chapters are short, the setting vividly realized. Maybe it's despite all of this or because of it that the story of two twinkling souls in the vast darkness of the Second World War struck me as so maudlin. Sentimental verging on saccharine.
Marie-Laure is a blind, Parisian girl living with her father who does security work at Museum of Natural History. He builds a perfect miniature replica of the their neighborhood, so that Marie-Laure may learn it by touch and by the more amorphous and spiritual cousin, feeling. The Nazi's arrive, and Marie-Laure and her father flee to Saint-Malo.
Meanwhile, in a German mining town, young orphaned Werner, along with his younger sister, lives the life one might expect of German orphans in the Interwar Years and happens upon a radio. Thus begins his romance with technology, one of the book's bludgeon-you-over-the-head themes being the ways in which devices like the radio connect and bring solace to distant, unexacting souls, how technology can cross untold distances and create at least the mirage of human contact, alleviating aloneness.
On a craft level, this novel is a jewel. A diamond. Leitmotifs are expertly deployed. Scenes build in a way meant to tug the heartstrings. Chapters end with kickers that gorgeously pull together the linguistic moment built up from each chapter's start.
But I was left cold. I didn't care for the characters really, enjoyed them only in the midst of the gilded lyrical field in which they roamed. Perhaps it is simply that stories set in World War II bore me or that I've seen that field plowed so many times before, perhaps it is that this book didn't, to me, strike any terrifyingly new ground. Perhaps getting older has conditioned me to expect more cynicism in the stories I read, thus becoming disappointed when I find none.
However expertly this book is written, it left me with the feeling that I had just watched the machinations of an impossibly detailed and crafted clock, rather than having watched the sun and the shadows it cast in my efforts to discern the passage of time.
Anthony Doerr
There is some heart-stoppingly gorgeous writing in this book, some scenes laid out with brain-breaking brilliance. The language manages to be languid and searing. The chapters are short, the setting vividly realized. Maybe it's despite all of this or because of it that the story of two twinkling souls in the vast darkness of the Second World War struck me as so maudlin. Sentimental verging on saccharine.
Marie-Laure is a blind, Parisian girl living with her father who does security work at Museum of Natural History. He builds a perfect miniature replica of the their neighborhood, so that Marie-Laure may learn it by touch and by the more amorphous and spiritual cousin, feeling. The Nazi's arrive, and Marie-Laure and her father flee to Saint-Malo.
Meanwhile, in a German mining town, young orphaned Werner, along with his younger sister, lives the life one might expect of German orphans in the Interwar Years and happens upon a radio. Thus begins his romance with technology, one of the book's bludgeon-you-over-the-head themes being the ways in which devices like the radio connect and bring solace to distant, unexacting souls, how technology can cross untold distances and create at least the mirage of human contact, alleviating aloneness.
On a craft level, this novel is a jewel. A diamond. Leitmotifs are expertly deployed. Scenes build in a way meant to tug the heartstrings. Chapters end with kickers that gorgeously pull together the linguistic moment built up from each chapter's start.
But I was left cold. I didn't care for the characters really, enjoyed them only in the midst of the gilded lyrical field in which they roamed. Perhaps it is simply that stories set in World War II bore me or that I've seen that field plowed so many times before, perhaps it is that this book didn't, to me, strike any terrifyingly new ground. Perhaps getting older has conditioned me to expect more cynicism in the stories I read, thus becoming disappointed when I find none.
However expertly this book is written, it left me with the feeling that I had just watched the machinations of an impossibly detailed and crafted clock, rather than having watched the sun and the shadows it cast in my efforts to discern the passage of time.