Going back and forth from August 1944 and the 5 years leading up to it the story of French Marie-Laure and German Werner are on a collision course. She is a young girl who at the age of 6 went blind. He is a young boy who is an orphan living with his sister in a children's home.
Their stories are drawn together by the thread of Marie-Laure's great-grandfather's radio broadcasts which influence the life of Werner. He being German and aryan looking as well as being a wiz with radios gets sent with many young German boys to a school where they are trained to fill out the ranks of the German army during WWII. She flees Paris with her father after it becomes too dangerous. By very different paths they both end up in Saint-Malo.
Along the way there is the search for a gem that a dying German officer believes will save his life. His search has his story crossing into Werner and Marie-Laure's.
The way this story is told, jumping back and forth was really well done. When you are going through our day to day business of living you never know how what you are doing and going through might be having an effect of the lives of others near and far. When you are in the middle of things you can't see or imagine the big picture. Here we get to be observers of the big picture as it unfolds and can see the threads connecting these characters.
All the Light We Cannot See is also a story about how the accident of birth place and time can have such a major impact on who we turn out to be and the way we experience events. Werner and Marie-Laure are living through the same war but from different sides and it gives perspective on events as well as how people become who they do. Werner's story doesn't have becoming a member of the Nazi machine involved in the camps but you can see how the boys he was in school with who did go that way did so.
All of this well done story is told in some really beautiful writing.
(Finished June 15, 2015)
No comments:
Post a Comment