Book Review: All The Light We Cannot See

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

I’m calling it. This is the best book of 2024 by a mile. This book was a stunning read; do not be intimidated by its unilateral narrative and changing narrator (or the 530 pages) it was a beautiful read. Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and when I was speeding through the book, I could see why. I couldn't put the book down.

To summarise, this modern fairytale focuses on two protagonists: Marie-Laure, who is blind, and Werner, who is an engineering prodigy. Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her father and spends her days with him at the start of the novel at the Museum of Natural History.  Werner lives in Germany in a Children's home with his younger sister Jutta, and the Second World War is on the horizon. These two characters are thrown into the chaos of war, but their destinies form a perfect Fibonacci spiral, where their fates collide with a bang.

One of the book's many themes is actually the physical absence of light, but what becomes illuminatory. Marie-Laure’s world is dark, but the key is how she illuminates the world around her. One of the ways is through storytelling, particularly the Jules Verne novel - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, which adds colour to her darkened world. For Werner, it's the radio. His world seems fixed, growing up in a mining community, his future is down a mine into the dark. But hearing science broadcasts on the radio electrifies his curiosity.

The radio features heavily for both Marie-Laure and Werner; it was the main form of communication before television during the 30s and 40s. But what the narrative does is subvert the bright, illuminatory ideal of the ‘radio’ for Werner because it attracts the attention of the Hitler Youth. Marie-Laure ends up using the radio as Resistance, as a light to her fellow Frenchmen. Marie Laure might be blind, but using Radio as her vessel, she becomes ephemeral as the truth, both figuratively and literally, is light.

What I enjoyed about the structure is the near-constant change of time and narrative. There are many voices in this novel - too many to name here, but it keeps you on the edge of your seat. Each chapter is short but occasionally ends on a cliffhanger, leading you to keep turning those pages to find out what happens next! It might be confusing to some, but I didn't mind the changing of time. We start the novel in the throws of war but revert back to Werner and Marie-Laure's childhoods. This tool is similar to the writing in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where everything you are reading feels like the most important part. This book too has similar fairytale traits, but unlike traditional fairytales the lines of what is good and what is bad become blurred.

It is a bittersweet fairytale set during the darkest of times of modern history. Be ready to have your perceptions on what is right and wrong challenged, and prepare to have your heart broken, healed and broken again. I call it a fairytale because it was a magical read as Doer’s language is rich and highly textured. I would highly recommend this to read, it is perfect.