All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Between the brilliant blue covers of Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See is the story of Marie-Laure, a French girl, blind from the age of six, yet imaginative enough to show the reader,the streets and alleys of Saint Malo in vivid colours. There is a precious blue diamond which, as the legend goes, renders its possessor deathless, but curses everyone else around him/her to endless misfortune. There is Etienne LeBlanc, a traumatised old veteran of the first war, who hides himself in an attic and transmits his brother’s recordings of science lessons for children, not knowing that thousands of miles away in Germany these recordings pique the curiosity of an adolescent orphan boy Werner Pfennig and his sisterJutta, animating their little world. There is, however, a war brewing in the background, the greatest and the most terrible that the world has ever seen, which tears their worlds apart, but somehow ties them together in mysterious ways.
Some books are like your childhood’s favourite ice-cream. You love it, you want to go on eating it, yet you take as little spoonfuls as possible, for fear of finishing it too soon. This is one such book. You love it; it is so compelling that you want to keep reading till the last page. Yet you do not want it to finish, so you slow down, taking your time to savour it page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word. And when you finally do read the last word, there is that inevitable sense of loss that one feels after completing a really good book. Doerr paints each sight, event and experience like an artist, capturing even the smells and sound associated with them. His sentences are short, but they convey a lot more than one would expect so few words to say. This is a book to not just read but also to experience, and one I would love to return to, years later.
– Harsha
the pensive soul 