"All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

I have mixed emotions about this book. It is exceptionally well-written. The language is so beautiful that every page feels like an intricate carving. You can tell Doerr spent a lot of time wordsmithing his sentences trying to get it just right.  I did also appreciate the overall message of the novel that the war ruins the lives of all: the aggressors and those who are being attacked. Basically, there are no winners in the end – lives are maimed and souls forever scarred. Underneath the broad labels of “Nazi Germany” and “occupied France” are the lives of ordinary people. Some, like Werner, follow all the rules and get swallowed up by the system, others, like Frederick, try to rebel and are brutally punished. Werner is just a boy who wants to study science and instead gets inextricably entangled in the Hitler’s Youth machine. Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and her great uncle, who is scared of his own shadows as a result of what he saw during the First World War, are the unexpected heroes of the French resistance in North West France.

The reason I am docking a star in my rating of this book (4 out 5) is because of the way Doerr dehumanizes Eastern Europeans in the book. Doerr empathizes and aches for the fates of Frederick, Werner, Jutta and others in Germany. He feels the pain and suffering of Marie-Laure and her friends and family. But the Russians/Ukrainians/Poles and others are continuously described using the Nazi rhetoric of the time as barbarians, beasts and dirty swine. Even when Werner tracks down partisans in Ukraine and Russia, those scenes read as though isolated individuals worked in mostly uninhabited areas. What’s missing from the picture are the 20 million dead in the Soviet Union alone as a result of the Nazi invasion. If an author is going to describe those people as swine, he might as well mention what kind of brutality they lived through in the conflict. I just thought for someone who wanted to show the spectrum of what we normally do not see (hence the title), his portrayal of Eastern Europeans is seriously lacking. I wish he did not focus on it at all. In the same vein, the rape scene in Berlin is inserted into the book almost as an afterthought. Jutta lived in Zollverein, 450 km west of Berlin on the border with Belgium. To me the fact that orphan teenage girls would be sent to Berlin in 1945 to do menial labor is a bit of a stretch in the whole story.  Doerr wanted to show “Russian swine” exacting revenge on the German civilians and the only way to do it was to pluck Jutta out of Zollverein and put her squarely in their path. So up until that point in the story, I really liked the book, and then it just killed me. Again, the problem I have with it is inconsistency in the message. If the message is there are no winners in a war, then please do show us the humanity of all sides, not just the civilized Germans and French. In Doerr’s book, Eastern Europeans do not rise above faceless barbarians, and I find that shocking and sad.

I do realize that my problems with the book are outside of the main plot line, hence the reason I am docking only one star and not more. I did really enjoy the story of Marie-Laure and Werner. The unexpected connection they had was beautiful and heartbreaking. And the way Doerr described Marie-Laure’s relationship with her father is brilliant and moving. So overall, I do highly recommend the book even though I had a few issues with it.