A prompt response to a Prompt from Promptly Written
A Book That Lifted My Spirits
‘All the Light We Cannot See’, by Anthony Doerr
Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a six-year-old blind girl living in Paris with her father, the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. The year is 1934. Her father constructs a scale model of their neighborhood to help her get about the neighborhood.
In the coal-mining town of Zollverein, Germany, lives eight-year-old Werner Pfennig, an orphan. He is exceptionally bright with a natural skill for repairing radios. Finding a broken radio on a junk heap, with his younger sister Jutta, he fixes it and they use it to listen to science and music programs transmitted across Europe.
In 1940, Germany invades France, and Marie-Laure and her father flee to the coastal town of Saint-Malo to take refuge with her great-uncle Etienne, a reclusive veteran of the Great War. Werner’s skill earns him a place at the National Political Institute of Education at Schulpforta, which is a boarding school teaching Nazi values. Later, he is placed in the Wehrmacht, tracking illegal enemy signals, with Volkheimer, a large, gentle soldier from Schulpforta.
And the story goes on.
Characters appear and disappear, the plot ravels and unravels, across countries and continents, over air, sea, and land.
You know how you feel sometimes after reading a good book? You finish it and you are totally numb, you stare at the wall, and you don’t know what is happening?
Well, for this book, you get that feeling after every chapter, sometimes after every page. There were times when I felt that after every paragraph.
I run out of adjectives, adverbs and phrases trying to describe the book. There is a strange, liquid tenderness that fills your soul as you read…and through all of it, every word and sentence, you realise that no matter where we are and how different we are as people, we are, as individuals, by default, good people, with good intentions.
A powerful, punch-packed book: and it made me feel inebriated at the end of it, with a message of hope, a memory of love and laughter, and the mystique of life. And a thinly veiled warning: when there is light in your life, acknowledge it, appreciate it, gather it to your heart, because you don’t know how long it will stay.
Is it any wonder that the book won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction?
Read the book for the laughter and the tears, for the love and the tenderness, for the sense of gratitude, and the gift of beauty.
Read it for the gift of sight.
Pun, intended.
