All The Light We Cannot See
If you like historical fiction novels with ensemble casts that run multiple plotlines with a myriad of perspectives, if you like books with fresh, clear imagery, or if you, above all, are looking for a highly original stylistic take on WWII, do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.
Doerr wrote this book to remind his audience of the miracle of human achievement that is long-distance communication, how a thousand ears can be linked to a single mouth by one microphone and the radio.
When most people think “radio,” they think of voices, of music.
But All the Light We Cannot See has accomplished something not in sound, but in imagery – Doerr, writing in the negative space between paper-cut-out depictions …show more content…
Let me take this opportunity to introduce main character Werner Pfennig, a poor, young German boy highly gifted in the manipulation of electrical circuitry. He repairs a radio he and his sister find in the trash. And what does he hear on the other end? A science program for children, broadcasting all the way from France, which imparts to him the following:
“The brain is locked in total darkness…It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how…does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?” (Doerr 48)
Coincidentally, another one of our main characters is blind: a young Parisian girl named Marie-Laure. She appeared with Werner in what is perhaps the earliest scene to have been drafted by Doerr in the 10 years it took him to write this book: a scene in which a boy sits in the dark, and, over the radio, comes the voice of a girl reading a story to
Doerr wrote this book to remind his audience of the miracle of human achievement that is long-distance communication, how a thousand ears can be linked to a single mouth by one microphone and the radio.
When most people think “radio,” they think of voices, of music.
But All the Light We Cannot See has accomplished something not in sound, but in imagery – Doerr, writing in the negative space between paper-cut-out depictions …show more content…
Let me take this opportunity to introduce main character Werner Pfennig, a poor, young German boy highly gifted in the manipulation of electrical circuitry. He repairs a radio he and his sister find in the trash. And what does he hear on the other end? A science program for children, broadcasting all the way from France, which imparts to him the following:
“The brain is locked in total darkness…It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how…does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?” (Doerr 48)
Coincidentally, another one of our main characters is blind: a young Parisian girl named Marie-Laure. She appeared with Werner in what is perhaps the earliest scene to have been drafted by Doerr in the 10 years it took him to write this book: a scene in which a boy sits in the dark, and, over the radio, comes the voice of a girl reading a story to