All The Light We Cannot See

Are you kidding me!? Are you absolutely bloody shitting me right now!? Did I pick up the same book as everybody else? It has the same cover and the same title and the fucking same author. BUT, I HATED THIS BOOK!!!

DNF’d at page 220. I tried

I feel like I have been utterly duped. Sold the last deliciously juicy apple in the store only to find that it’s rotted and brown on the inside.

All the light we cannot see is right. I thought this title was beautiful, but now I think it speaks volumes for how disappointed I am over this.

BOOK DISCRIPTION: A girl and a boy, One a Nazi in training and the other blind.

Girl reads all the time and is constantly stuck in a house, in Paris and in Saint-Malo, her Father is a key-holder and is also guarding a stone that really doesn’t add anything to the story.

Boy is from a coal mining town In Germany and is super-duper smart. Therefore, the Nazi take him to their very special boy’s school where he trains to be a very good robot.

Nothing much else happens, but it will take you 200 pages just to get through that, so buckle up!

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. If 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 colour and movement. So how children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

THINGS I HATED:

· The chapters were too short. Normally I like this, in fact I love it when chapters are short. It did not work for this book. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Fast forward. Stop. Start. Rewind. (You will have no hair left to pull out).

The story was already so fragmented that pulling me out of one POV from say Marie-Laure in Paris 1941 and into another from somebody else in 1940. And, Sometimes I didn’t even know who the chapters were about. Example: I found myself reading about Warner’s Sergeant Major and had to go back a few chapter just to get the name of who the hell I was reading about. It all just disconnected me from the story as a whole.

It didn’t make it any easier with the jumping around from date to date in a not so chronological order.

All it seemed to do was take me away from the already boring story line.

· I shit you not this was like waiting for a Youtube video to buffer. It ran clear and smooth for a little while. It would stop, (on account of the distracting beautiful words and writing, or the disconnecting POV changes) you would have to let it load again and then it would stop again!

In the end, even though the content may be pretty it’s just not worth wasting your life over if you aren’t getting the whole smooth continuous story. I read 220 pages and felt like I know nothing. Everything could have been condensed to 100 pages, if that.

· In my opinion I hated that this book was written in third person. Just another way for me to feel disconnected from the story. There were no inner monologues, only what is assumed or witnessed by the omniscient observer. This made me feel like I couldn’t relate as well to the characters as what I could have if it was written in first-person. And thus, I had no sense of attachment.

THINGS THAT I LIKED BUT DIDN’T WORK FOR THE STORY:

Relating to the point above. THE CHARACTERS

· I enjoyed Warner as a character. I was just sad that this is the story he had to get the part in.

He was kind, quiet and smart. I loved that he was a tinkerer and enjoyed working with his hands. There is not enough smart mathematical brain representation in younger children.

I wanted more from his relationship with his sister, who I also adored.

· I did not like Laurie-Marie. She was blend and had no personality. The only thing that made her different and vaguely interesting was that she was blind. But, blindness is not a personality.

I loved the Blind representation and I understand what Doerr was trying to accomplish. I understand that it was a different way of “looking at the war” and having a different experience and perspective of it. I really appreciated it. I just wish Laurie-Marie had more personality and also that the book wasn’t so boring.

Make of this what you will but I feel like the only reason why this book won the Pulitzer Prize 2015 was solely because of the disability (Sorry if I offend anyone by calling it a disability) representation.

Doerr’s lexicon is amazing! He has a beautiful way with words. Even sentences. I can open any page in this book and find such beautiful writing. Example:

“A machine gun fires somewhere, a sound like a chain of beads passing through fingers.”

“She’s eating wedges of wet sunlight”

“And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city had been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it toward the breaking point.”

Yes, His words are beautiful. An individual flower, can be mesmerising and stunning, but take a step back. A multitude of the same flower does not make a great garden. In this case a novel.

Maybe this would have been better as a short book of sentences.