All the Light We Cannot See: Review with Spoilers

I really liked this book; seriously, I liked it about as much as I did The Help and the film Argo. Three days after I finished the novel, I was still thinking about Marie-Laure, her father, her uncle, all the characters really. I thought about their choices and admired their integrity or repulsed at their lack of. All the Light We Cannot See is a book that broadened my perspective and has jumped to the top of my best reads list.

This book has been rather difficult for me to write a review about. Not because it wasn’t thought provoking or well written, but because it was a personal experience and those feelings are difficult to verbalize. I saw a bit of myself in each of the characters and felt the book was more than nouns, conjugations, and adjectives. Speaking of adjectives, there was quite a bit of descriptive and expressive language in the book. I’ve speculated that this could partially be because one of the main characters is blind and so verbal descriptions are very important to her.

In addition to descriptive and potentially “flowery” language, the novel’s structure reminded me a bit of a romantic era work. The timeline is structured as separate threads of the novel’s tapestry, each chapter an individual character’s past or present.

It moves between about five frames of reference. The separate characters’ stories converge because of a mythical tale and curse attached to a priceless diamond. The diamond is attributed supernatural abilities and as the reader I often wondered how I would respond if placed in the characters’ circumstances.

The two most prominent characters are Marie-Laure, a young blind French girl, and Werner a bright young man caught in the crossfire of the third Reich. Radio broadcasts and the allegedly cursed diamond bring them together in an occupied French seaside city.

The novel isn’t a love story or a history of WWII. It’s a deeper inspection of values, courage, and the importance of communication.

PS: Pseudo-Intellectual Thoughts

I’ve decided to include my thoughts on the character I couldn’t get my mind off of, Frederick. Frederick, the innocent youth who loved birds and hid his glasses. His story contains an integral inspection of courage and moral values. This inspection can be seen through the author’s use of vampirism.

First I’ll explain where my ideas about this vampirism came. Several days before I finished the novel I was helping my brother with an AP Literature assignment. The topic was vampirism and I explained it as exploitation of a character. Dracula comes into a story, his victim a youth, and Dracula exploits the victim’s youth/innocence/desirable trait and essentially makes them like himself. The victim becoming the next vampire. To me, vampirism isn’t just the exploitation of youth. It’s also when an outside corrupted source takes with force and corrupts the victim. I see vampirism in Frederick’s story.

The vampires in Frederick’s story are the boys surrounding him at the Nazi-Soldier-in-Training-School. The majority of these boys are the product of Hitler Youth and, with the encouragement of their leaders, torments those who are different. Frederick is different because he cannot run fast; his eyesight is poor, and his non-Nazi like sensitivity. Frederick is the innocent gentle youth that the vampire could not corrupt. Because the corrupted boys could neither change Frederick’s morals nor his mind, they had to contaminate him another way. If they could not drag him down in ideology, then they would drag him down physically. They beat him literally within an inch of his life, forcing his body to become damaged like their minds.  

From Frederick’s story I choose not to just see it solely as an example of vampirism. I choose to see a bright youth who resisted the exploitation and corruption surrounding him. I see the potential victim resisting the ideology of the Third Reich. At some point in the novel Frederick says something to the effect of “You think we have a choice? We don’t have a choice.” The irony is that Frederick makes his own choices, resisting even when he thinks he has given in.

I highly recommend this book, but with the caution that there is a “brief and very vague” rape scene (which is about one page of the 500 something).