The story is set in Germany and France before and during the German occupation of France. Doerr's active imagination appears to be influenced by Hans Christian Andersen's children's book: Marie-Laure is a little blind French child who is motherless, and Werner Pfennig, a boy of seven living with his little sister, Jutta in an orphanage in the German mining town of Zollverein, near Essen.
When the tale opens in Paris in 1934, Marie-Laure is six years old and lives with her beloved Papa, a locksmith and the keeper of the keys at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. The Sea of Flame is an accursed jewel, a greyish-blue sea diamond with a crimson glow at its center that has been buried in the museum's vaults for the past 200 years. When World War II broke out, Marie-Laure and her Papa were forced to abandon Paris and relocate to Saint-Marlo to live with her great-uncle Etienne. Meanwhile, Werner's talent attracts the Nazis' attention, and he is taken to a national school where he is brutally trained as an elite cadre for the Third Reich.
Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
The word "light" in the title refers to a topic Werner hears addressed on a late-1930s radio broadcast concerning the brain's ability to make light in the dark. It's a theme that grows in importance as the novel develops. The fact that the professor on the radio turns out to be Marie-Laure's grandfather only adds to the story's themes of serendipity and coincidence. Werner's school's ruthless testing of his decency threatens to extinguish any of the brightness that made him such a unique young man.
Another of the numerous recurring themes in this novel is self-defense. Marie-Laure is captivated by snails, earning the moniker Whelk when Saint-Malo begins its small but inventive Resistance operations; she is not afraid but admires a snail's skill to keep seabirds from crushing its shell.
Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
A small thank you to Mr. Doerr for creating a very readable format for this complex work, with many chapters being less than a page and a half long. All the Light We Cannot See is less than superb literature and more than a thriller. As a result, it qualifies as a "good read". If Doerr truly tried, he might be able to write great literature. If he did, I'd be overjoyed.
SCORE: 4/5
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