"Boy meets girl in Anthony Doerr’s
hauntingly beautiful new book, but the circumstances are as elegantly
circuitous as they can be. The heroine of “All the Light We Cannot See”
is blind, but anyone familiar with Mr. Doerr’s work, which includes the
short-story collections “The Shell Collector” and “Memory Wall,” will know that its title has many more meanings than that.
The
heroine is Marie-Laure LeBlanc, whose loving father, a talented
locksmith, goes to extraordinary lengths to help her compensate for the
loss of her eyesight. Professionally, Marie-Laure’s father oversees all
the locks at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Privately, after
his daughter is blinded by cataracts in 1934 at the age of 6, he devises
tiny, intricate models of the places she must go, so that she learns to
navigate by touch and then by memory.
Mr.
Doerr’s acutely sensory style captures the extreme perceptiveness
Marie-Laure has developed by the time World War II begins. Much of the
story unfolds during the war, although it jumps back and forth. The book
opens in August 1944, two months after D-Day, with the sound of things
falling from the sky and rattling against windows. Marie-Laure knows
these are leaflets. She can smell the fresh ink.
She
is in the walled Breton city of Saint-Malo, a terrifically picturesque
and apt setting for the most dramatic part of Mr. Doerr’s story.
Saint-Malo is occupied by German forces and under siege by the Allied
bombers that destroyed much of it before the war was over. And five
streets away from the house to which Marie-Laure and her father have
fled, a young German soldier named Werner Pfennig is trapped in the
ruins of a grand hotel. Long before Werner and Marie-Laure meet, Mr.
Doerr has created a skein of ties between them.
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