Reviews
I am angry and sad and ready to scream. This boy holy shit. Like I need to touch some grass because the emotions he pulled out of me? Brooooooo. I have many thoughts about Werner Pfennig. Babe hold my hand cause I am not alright.
"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."A novel a decade in the making, All the Light We Cannot See is simply one of the most finely tuned pieces of art I've had the pleasure of experiencing in quite some time. And I don't say "experiencing" lightly: I found it impossible to just simply "read" this book. In fact, it almost manages to give a bad connotation to each and every time I say, "Yeah, I read that book."In a day and age of textspeak, beautiful language appears to be more and more impossible to discover. Enter All the Light, and the dancing and interweaving metaphors, similes, and the impeccable prose of Anthony Doerr. Whether it be about mollusks, radios, love, or warfare, Doerr describes each and every detail of the haunting world he has written about.While this novel juggles various themes and characters, the heart of Doerr's masterpiece belongs to the lives of Werner and Marie-Laure. Their interweaving tales pose questions of both life and death: Are you truly living if you follow the orders of others, while ignoring your own hopes and beliefs? Can we ever completely move on from a past that haunts us? Should we want to? How can life continue on, so still and unwavering, when so many people have left our lives and this world, as quickly as they've entered it?During their brief chapters together, Werner and Marie-Laure form a bond as strong as one that would ordinarily take hundreds of pages to build. Their connection is originated not from sudden lust or years of friendship, but instead, by each making it through hell and happening to find each other on the other side. Like mostly everything in All the Light, their time together doesn't last long, but for me, it left a lasting impression, not unlike the one I had "experiencing" this wonderful book.