All the Light We Cannot See is in fact two separate stories about two separate characters that eventually converge. Like two waves of similar frequency, each unique story is made stronger when they are attuned to overlap. Set during World War II, All the Light We Cannot See follows the paths of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French blind girl, and Werner Pfennig, a German boy and brilliant tinkerer, and their respective struggles on either side of the war.
Initially, Marie-laure is guided by her father, but must learn to manage on her own when he is unexpectedly taken from her. Werner, meanwhile, possesses a self-taught talent for radios and their uses, and his talents are put to use in the military by the Nazi youth. As time passes, Marie-Laure and Werner are drawn closer together by the events around them, until their paths cross, and their shared history is revealed.
I enjoyed this story for what it was, but that is ultimately a polite way of saying that I found it pleasant, contrived, and weirdly superstitious. You see, a very large, and I mean, a tremendously hefty chunk of the book, is dedicated to the existence of a mystical diamond that prevents its owner from dying, but also curses their loved ones with misfortune. This element of pure fantasy, in a book of what is otherwise historical fiction, severely hampered my immersion. I simply did not care about the diamond, and every time it was brought up, I was ripped away from the otherwise reasonable story surrounding the two characters. I don’t even know why it was included, except to imply that maybe that’s why some of the characters survive and others do not, but there is no need to ever describe that element. I mean, it’s World War II, simply calling it luck would have been equally convincing.
Of additional minor complaint is that the plot itself is more than a little contrived, and many of the sub-plots feel incomplete. It is as though the author wanted to explore them, and thus introduced them, but instead chose to abandon them rather than flesh them out, and much the same way, as the story comes to a close, some of the outcomes for the various characters felt abrupt and altogether unsatisfying. While this may be appropriate to convey the horrors of a wartime story, it felt inappropriate and forced, as though the author felt the need to be cruel in order to make it more believable. To me, this made those events feel unnecessary and hollow, as if the author simply grew bored of writing for those characters.
To summarize my feelings, I awarded it four stars on Goodreads, but I’m glad I finished reading it before I discovered that it won a Pulitzer Prize. If I had known that going in, I would have been naught but disappointed.
Although not particularly relevant to this review, the title itself, All the Light We Cannot See, struck me as the most clever aspect of the entire story. Radio plays an integral role in the story, and both light and radio waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that radio waves are simply light we cannot see. That, plus one of the primary characters being blind, makes for a truly fantastic and evocative title.
