[books]
Not blind Light looks beyond the shadows of war by Jo Deurbrouck
Last winter, a handful of marbles made internaWerner’s future is not bright. His drafty twotional news. They came to light among the belongings story orphanage stands in a gray-skied coal mining of an Amsterdam woman who’d been given them for town. It is “populated with the coughs of sick chilsafekeeping in 1942. Their owner was a playmate dren and the crying of newborns and battered trunks preparing to go into hiding from the Nazis, a girl inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased named Anne Frank. parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutThose faded bits of glass reminded me that the lery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the author of that iconic book, The Diary of A Young Girl, mines.” He has been told that at 15 he must descend into had been a child—a hunted, hungry child, to all appearances a victim—who had nevertheless dared to those same mines. All the orphanage boys are required to. He has been told it’s an honor to serve dream and create and perhaps even thrive. The day I heard about those marbles, I read the final Germany in this way. Growing up in that environment, Werner’s weakpages of a new novel set in Europe during World War II. It’s called All the Light We Cannot See by Idaho writer ness is heartbreakingly understandable. He will do anything to escape his and short story master assigned fate, even Anthony Doerr. And it, convince himself that too, reminded me of letting the Nazis send something important. him to school does not The novel centers make him a Nazi. on Marie-Laure, a girl Werner and Mariewhose enviable childLaure’s separate stories hood is spent in pre-inare shaped into chapvasion Paris. She is ters as small, dense and blind, but her world is polished as marbles, not dark. It’s vivid. Her then gathered into two father is a good man intricately interwoven made wise by his care timelines. In the first, for this preternaturally the two are children. In sensitive daughter. He the second they are crafts a rich childhood teenagers on the eve of for her. For instance, he a major Allied bombing builds a scale model of raid, one of the final their neighborhood, battles in the war. In sort of a three dimenthis later timeline their sional braille map, then paths finally intersect, walks his daughter out and although this meetinto the streets day ing is constrained by a after day so she can try lifetime of choices— to lead him home. The theirs as well as othfirst time she succeeds, All the Light We Cannot See ers’—it is also theirs to she is 8. She feels him Anthony Doerr seize. at her back as they hardcover, Scribner I sometimes grow reach their building. 544 pages, $27 frustrated with comHe grins silently at the plexly plotted novels sky, then picks her up because they demand that I attend more to weaving and swings her, victorious, through the air. Marie-Laure’s father works in a museum, and the their mass of threads into coherence than to enjoying museum collections become her toys and her teachers. the tapestry, the story itself. But Doerr’s tiny chapters She learns early that “To really touch something…is seemed almost to weave themselves. I found myself to love it.” As she grows, she hones her senses and rereading chapters often, but always for their spare, imagination until, at 16, she is able to give us this mag- pitch-perfect grace, never because I had lost a thread. ical vision: “…to shut your eyes is to guess nothing of Beyond the pleasure of watching its story take blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and shape, Doerr’s novel gave me a powerful gift. Like every buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where other book I’ve loved that is set amid the horrors of surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals war, from The Things They Carried to Slaughterhouse through the air.” Five, All the Light We Cannot See refuses to be about The novel is also about Werner, a German orphan victims. It’s about the necessity of believing, against a whose childhood is as exposed and malnourished as preponderance of evidence, that there are none. Doerr Marie-Laure’s is sheltered and enriched. Werner is smart has written a modern classic about goodness in the and likable, with a startling mechanical aptitude. When shadow of evil and the beauty that can be wrought by he is 8, he finds a broken radio. He studies, then repairs, people fighting simply for a chance to thrive. then improves it until it conjures magical voices—illicit voices from outside Germany—from Rome, Paris, Verona. arts@missoulanews.com
missoulanews.com • May 22–May 29, 2014 [21]