Anthony Doerr

​All the Light We Cannot See

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This historical fiction novel, like many before it, exposes the brutality of the German project of the 1930s and 1940s and the lives that it crushed. This particular novel follows the trajectories of a boy and a girl swept up in historical tides. Ocean tides lap the ramparts of Saint-Malo, France during its occupation and siege, where the paths of Werner, a dreamy orphan boy conscripted into the German army, and Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, cross in a day’s worth of unlikely yet consequential events. 

 

The novel is beautiful, lyrical, serendipitous—glancing the margins of improbability. In language and theme, it echoes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. For both Woolf’s Septimus and Doerr’s Werner, war-related trauma manifests as hallucinatory dream-memories and apprehension of phenomena in the natural world. “Everything rustles … clouds hurtle … trees dance … moonlight shines and billows,” writes Doerr of Werner’s trauma response.

 

As a young boy, Werner had dreamed of being an engineer. “What the war did to dreamers” Werner laments. Yet, Doerr refuses to abandon the lessons of history, dreaming up Werner’s and Marie-Laure’s stories, recognizing that creativity resists fascism. In the end, the novel instructs, even incites, its readers to dream a different world into existence.

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