The boy is a German orphan with a remarkable aptitude for machines (specifically radio transmitters) which the Nazis exploit in a troubled, conflicted journey through the Nazi youth into the army.

The girl is a blind Parisian who is hiding in her great-uncle’s house on the coast of France during the German siege of Saint-Malo during World War II. Published in 2014, it is about, essentially, two teenagers, one a boy and one a girl. (Also, why was Marie-Laure’s father called “the locksmith” so much (at least at the beginning)? Why not “Papa?” or whatever his name was?)Īll the Light We Cannot See is a #1 New York Times Bestseller, a book that I see prominent in every single bookstore I go in to, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In fact, I thought the present tense was a little weird with a blind character, because I felt an intimacy that contradicted the physical description I was being given.

Why was my ADHD on red-alert all the time? The jumping around, chopping things up, and being distracted by present tense just never justified itself, for me. This is not the end-all, be-all of writing expectations of course: we like literature to defy boundaries and surprise us and evolve and all that (at least sometimes), but I just couldn’t understand what the point of Doerr’s non-traditional choices was. I firmly believe that if All the Light You Cannot See had been in the past tense, had been told mostly chronologically, and had longer chapters (therefore longer times between switching between characters), I wouldn’t have been able to put it down. As a writer, you want a reader to slip into your book (or story) and get lost there. If that writer does not then make up for the demands with more than enough positives, the reader will be ultimately unimpressed and may, indeed, abandon the narrative altogether. It is that when an author writes in a way that is unexpected, it makes demands on the reader. There is a principle with writing which I have mentioned before (and told you about my friend and his theory about figurative gold coins). For all the amazing-ness of All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr made some nontraditional choices: he went with present tense (mostly?), chopped his behemoth up into hundreds of few-page chapters (often even one page), told the story from two different perspectives (which was doubled in strangeness by being omniscient while being, as I said, present tense), and told his story in non-chronological chunks so that we saw the end a couple times before the beginning and middle.

All the light we cannot see review