Book Report: All the Light We Cannot See

15. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014) (8/27/19)

When I was in Saint-Malo recently, a friend asked me on Facebook (in response to photos I'd posted) if I'd read the book. "What book?" I asked. "All the Light We Cannot See," came the response. "Much of it takes place in Saint-Malo."
 I knew the book, of course (winner of the 2015 Pulitzer and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction). I have it, and had actually started it once, but it was somehow too . . . I don't know what—detailed? poetic? disjointed?—and I failed to get into it.
 So when I got home, I thought I'd give it another go. It took me a little while to get the rhythm, but once I was in the groove, it captivated me. Absolutely.
 In the end, the detail, the poetry, the structure—which is disjointed, going back and forth in time; jumping from one character to another, and then another is introduced, and back and forth there too, all in very short chapters contained within larger time-stamped parts—completely won me over. And the language! The emotion! The connections and, ultimately, interweavings! The whole thing is masterful, virtuosic.
 But I can thank Saint-Malo, and having been there and walked its streets and ramparts, for grounding me. That made the characters, the events, the places all the more real.
 The story starts with the dropping of leaflets on Saint-Malo on August 7, 1944, warning the inhabitants to evacuate the town: Allied bombers are coming, to finish off the German occupation of France. And so we are plunged into the very real history of World War II. We meet the blind girl, Marie-Laure, sixteen, and the eighteen-year-old German radio operator, Werner, both listening as the drone of planes grows louder.
 The story then goes back to 1934 and we begin to learn about these two characters, and about their loved ones: Marie-Laure's father, who builds her perfect replicas of the places they live, so she can navigate; Werner's sister, who questions everything, especially ideology. Every so often, we jump forward again to August 7, then 8, then 9, 1944, and back into the past as we watch our characters navigate wartime life, and we meet more people who mean something to them, or who they learn from (all the characters aren't necessarily good).
 A diamond with a curse is introduced early on, and a German officer who seeks it, for its promise of eternal life. Birds and snails play crucial roles. And radio—the story could not exist without radio.
 It's a complicated story, but oh so satisfying, as it takes us through the war and into the 1970s and even to 2014, where it ends on a perfect rhapsodic note.
 I love this book. I feel that I could open to any page and find something gorgeous to reproduce here, to give you an idea of the beauty. So, okay: I will. For the three main characters (though there are others I loved as well, who get their own little chapters—but let's keep it simple). Here goes.
 Here's Werner, an orphan visiting his bunkmate Frederick's wealthy home in Berlin. Fredde is quiet, artistic—and yet they're both at the National Political Institute of Education, being trained as soldiers of the Third Reich.

The building falls quiet. Model automobiles glimmer on Frederick's shelves.
 "Do you ever wish," whispers Werner, "that you didn't have to go back?"
 "Father needs me to be at Schulpforta. Mother too. It doesn't matter what I want."
 "Of course it matters. I want to be an engineer. And you want to study birds. Be like that American painter in the swamps. Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?"
 A stillness in the room. Out there in the trees beyond Frederick's window hangs an alien light.
 "Your problem, Werner," says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life."

And here is a gorgeous passage about Marie-Laure, whose blindness gives her other powers. She is about to transmit for the first time from an illicit radio in the attic. She will read the book she loves, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne, remembering reading it aloud to her great-uncle before he was taken away by the Germans:

She traces the lines of the cables until she is sure she has the microphone in her hand.
 To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth's crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.
 Rather than my reading it to you, maybe you could read it to me?
 With her free hand, she opens the novel in her lap. Finds the lines with her fingers. Brings the microphone to her lips.

And finally, here's the German officer seeking the precious jewel. He's found the apartment that Marie-Laure and her father lived in in Paris, which is boarded up, awaiting their return.

In the closet hang a few moth-eaten girl's dresses and a sweater on which embroidered goats chew flowers. Dusty pinecones line the windowsill, arranged large to small. On the floor of the kitchen, friction strips have been nailed into the wood. A place of quiet discipline. Calm. Order. A single line of twine runs between the table and the bathroom. A clock stands dead without glass on its face. It's not until he finds three huge spiral-bound folios of Jules Verne in Braille that he solves it.
 A safe maker. Brilliant with locks. Lives within walking distance of the [natural history] museum [where the diamond was housed]. Employed there all his life. Humble, no visible aspirations for wealth. A blind daughter. Plenty of reasons to be loyal.
 "Where are you hiding?" he says aloud to the room. The dust swirls in the strange light.

This book is so rich, I could go on and on quoting different bits for their lyricism; their exploration of character, of courage, of hope, of despair. And through all this jumping around, the plot remains tight. In my eyes, this book is a masterpiece. I'm so glad I went to Saint-Malo—both to have had another opportunity to finally read "the book" and, simply, to have been there: it's a beautiful little city.

Book Report: Life after Life

14. Kate Atkinson, Life after Life (2013) (8/5/19)

I bought this book in Toulouse, for the long flight home (a toss-up with Fight Club). In the end, though, I found myself glued to the screen in front of me, binge-watching The Wire, with a dessert of Casablanca. Sometimes reading is just too much work.

But I'd gotten a slight start in the airport, and it was enough to intrigue me as the main character, Ursula, is born on page 21, and again on page 25, then on 49, and 113, and 129—and a few more times over the novel's 611 pages and 30 sections (several of which comprise multiple time-stamped chapters). In between all these births, she gets killed off: at birth, a few years later by drowning, by falling out a window, by influenza (over and over and over, until finally she sees a way free), during the London blitz—etc.: Atkinson's quiver is full of interesting ways to do a person in by natural causes.

But the births and deaths aren't the point, so much as the life/lives lived in between, as Ursula unconsciously, subconsciously, accrues déjà vu moments of wisdom, which occasionally allow her to act in ways she doesn't entirely understand but that have real, positive consequences.

As Atkinson explains in an author's note, if the book is "about" anything, it's about being English and also about what we are in our own imaginations. It is also an act of "bearing witness to the past," since much of the story, which begins in 1910, takes place during WWII, in both England, during the blitz, and Germany, in the company of Eva Braun and Hitler himself. It's a historical novel, but more than that, it is a novel of imaginings: imagined futures, imagined possibilities.

And Atkinson is a wonderful writer—playful, funny, a skillful weaver-together of disparate times, scenes, characters, details. Here's one sample, from Ursula's seventh or eighth life (post-influenza), when her mother, Sylvie, sends her to see a psychiatrist:

"Reincarnation," Dr Kellet had said to her. "Have you heard of that?" Ursula, aged ten, shook her head. She had heard of very little. Dr Kellet had a nice set of rooms in Harley Street. The one that he showed Ursula into was half panelled in mellow oak, with a thick carpet figured in red and blue on the floor and two large leather armchairs either side of a well-stoked coal fire. Dr Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelt of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, "So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?" (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)
  . . . He had trained in Vienna ("where else?") but trod, he said, his own path. He was no one's disciple, he said, although he had studied "at the feet of all the teachers. One must nose forward," he said. "Nudge one's way through the chaos of our thoughts. Unite the divided self." Ursula had no idea what he was talking about.
 "The maid? You pushed her down the stairs?" It seemed a very direct question for someone who talked about nosing and nudging.
 "It was an accident." She didn't think of Bridget as "the maid," she thought of her as Bridget. And it was ages ago now.
 "Your mother is worried about you."
 "I just want you to be happy, darling," Sylvie said after she had made the appointment with Dr Kellet.
 "Aren't I happy?" Ursula puzzled.
 "What do you think?"
 Ursula didn't know. She wasn't sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.
 "As if there is another world?" Dr Kellet said.
 "Yes. But it's this one as well."
 ("I know she says the oddest things, but a psychiatrist?" Hugh [Ursula's father] said to Sylvie. He frowned. "She's only small. She's not defective."
 "Of course not. She just needs a little fixing.")

About three-quarters of the way through the book I confess I wasn't sure I was enjoying not knowing quite where the book was headed. By then, I thought, I should have at least had an idea. But the finish proved quite satisfying, so I forgive the author for frustrating her readers.