Book: All the Light We CannotSee
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publication: 2014
Pages: 530
Completion Date: 6/11/25
Why I read this book?
I read this book because someone recommended it to me awhile back & I added it to my master book list. The chapters were short, so it was easy reading. In fact, I would read a chapter, do 25 push-ups, reach another chapter, etc. Exercising & reading together makes both of them go faster.
Plot of the story
The book involves three main characters & several secondary characters in different parts of Europe before, during & after WWII. The most prominent character is Marie-Laure LeBlanc when she is six years old in Paris in 1934. She is blind, but can still get around Paris because her dad carved her neighborhood into a wooden small-scale model, right down to each & every street & house. He often carves these little houses with small locking mechanisms in them & gives them to Marie for her birthday. She has to open them to get her birthday present inside. Marie in her daily life walks with her cane to & from his place of work, the Natural History Museum of France. Daniel LeBlanc is a locksmith & in charge of ~12,000 keys to unlock each area, hallway, laboratory, office & exhibit there. Their most important & expensive exhibit is a 133 carat blue diamond as big as a pigeon’s egg-known as the “Sea of Flames.”
The second primary character is 8-year-old Werner Pfennig who is in an orphanage in Essen, Germany. He is a technological wizard & can repair & build all kinds of modern inventions, but specializes in radios, relatively new technology at that time. His younger sister Jutta is also there. When Werner recovers a broken radio from the dump & repairs it, he & his sister listen to a radio broadcast in French that is basically a science lesson that they can listen to.
The third character is Sergeant Major van Rumpel, one of the few non-Jewish gemologists in Germany. He works for the Nazi army recovering, cataloging & appraising gemstones & other valuables collected as the Nazi war machine rolls across Eastern & Western Europe. He knows of the “Sea of Flames” gem & makes it a personal mission to find it.
The book jumps back & forth from pre-war to war-time & between the areas where Werner, Jutta, Marie & Daniel are currently located & what they are doing. It shows Werner developing his technological skills in both the orphanage, passing the entrance exam & later attending the National Political Institute of Education where he is focusing his technical abilities on triangulation of radio signals. Meanwhile, Marie is learning to read Braille & she spends her day with her father at the museum, touring the various areas & learning from the staff there.
When the war starts, the museum makes three copies of the expensive gem & sends them, along with the original, to four different secret locations. Monsieur LeBlanc is tasked with taking one of them to an important donor in Evreux, France. Daniel & Marie have to walk as the railroad is out of commission. When they get there, he is gone & his house is on fire & being looted. They decide to go to St. Malo, a small city-fortress-island off the coast of the Brittony province of France where Monsieur LeBlanc’s uncle lives. Uncle Etienne has PTSD from his service in WWI & has not left his large 6-story chateau in years, but is cared for by Madame Manec.
Daniel is unable to contact the museum by phone or telegraph, so he decides to leave the gem (which turns out to be the real one & not one of the three replicas) at home & go to the museum to talk to someone in person. On his way there, he is arrested & imprisoned in a German labor camp. Marie stays with her uncle & Madame Manec, even as their area is occupied by the Germans & food & materials become increasingly scarce. As it turns out, Etienne has many different radios of all makes & models, as well as a decent sized transmitting radio. They turn everything, except the transmitter, into the Germans when they request it, at the threat of execution. Later, Madam Manec leads a group of ladies to be a small form of resistance, collecting information, passing secret notes, painting resistance graffiti on the walls, etc. Soon, Etienne becomes involved, transmitting coded messages across Europe & to Great Britain to aid the French Resistance.
Simultaneously, Werner is progressing through the institute. Several of the weaker kids are attacked & beaten. Werner’s friend, Frederick is beaten so badly that he is brain damaged & sent home. Werner is ultimately sent to the Russian front before him & his schoolmate Volkheimer graduate. They listen for radio transmissions from Russians & Ukrainians, triangulate their position with equipment partially developed by Werner, & attack the enemy positions. They continue doing this as they retreat from the Russian front across Eastern Europe.
Von Rumpel is following the various leads on the famous gemstone & finally discovers that there are three replicas. He slowly follows any clues & information he can on each one; finding them one-by- one & determining their authenticity. He finally realizes there is only one left, the real one, & the last person to have it is Daniel LeBlanc. He is slowly closing in on Marie & her home in St. Melo. About this time, the Germans realize someone is transmitting from the St. Melo area & request assistance to come find the offender – Werner & his crew. Manec has died of pneumonia & so the note collection & passing is now done by Marie.
Werner soon discovers that it is the home of Marie where the transmissions originate. He has seen Marie walking from the bakery to her home & falls in love with her, so he pretends that he is having trouble. Near the end of the book, Werner & Volkheimer are in the cellar of a hotel that has fallen in on them as a result of Allied bombing. They are there for three days before they finally escape. Werner immediately goes to Marie’s chateau. Von Rumpel is there looking for the gemstone & has nearly found Marie’s hiding spot. He fights with & kills Von Rumpel & saves Marie where he also learns that her great-uncle is the one who transmitted the scientific radio messages he listened to as a youth. He shows her how to reach the Allied lines. They swing by the ocean on the way, opening a small gate to reach the beach, so she can drop the gemstone in the water – possibly to prevent the legend of the curses associated with it. Soon after, Werner is killed by a land mine.
The story fast forwards to 1974. A POW processing camp finds Werner’s duffel bag & sends it to Volkheimer, who takes it to Jutta. Inside is a model house that can be opened. Volkheimer said that Werner fell in love with a girl in St Melo, so she took her 6-year-old son there on vacation & so she could get closure on his death. They show a person the model, who tells her where to find the real chateau. They get Marie’s name from the current owners & track her down in Paris. She lives in the apartment in which she grew up & works in a laboratory at the museum & has a 19-year-old daughter. They give her the scale model house & in return, she promises to send Jutta the last remaining phonographic record of the scientific radio programs. In the next-to-last chapter, Marie opens the little house finding a key inside, left there by Werner. It was the small key to the gate that led to the ocean. The last chapter shows Marie walking with her grandson in 2014 as he plays a video game. She realizes that he is communicating across the air waves with a friend, just as her uncle transmitted coded
messages to the Allies & earlier transmitted his scientific stories via radio across Europe, listed to by Werner & Jutta.
What I learned from this book:
- I did not put into the report all the atrocities associated with war, but they are many. Obviously, they occur during war. What is interesting is how people recover from them. Marie got through the loss of Madam Manec, her father (who never came back from the labor camp) & uncle. Jutta suffered the loss of her brother, near starvation and through the Rape of Berlin as the Soviets took Berlin. Volkheimer lost his comrade in arms. Even through all this loss, they all moved on with their lives in their own way.
- I really liked the writing style of this book. Each chapter was short and to the point, covering multiple people in multiple places over an 11 year time period.
- This was a very inspirational book and tied together several different themes. Primarily it pointed to communication over wavelengths, which is how the book got its name (too difficult to explain for the purpose of this book report). It also focuses on the need for people to stay in touch with what is important (like family) & avoid things that may seem consequential, but are not (like a big colorful diamond of unfathomable value).
What I learned from this book that will increase my prospects for success after prison:
- Marie walked from Paris to St Melo as a blind person, suffering from lack of food, blisters, etc. If she can do this and fearlessly relay messages for the Resistance, I can overcome the issues placed in my way as a current & future inmate. Marie believed in herself and could accomplish these things because of that. I also need to believe in myself now and over the next two years, both in and out of prison.
- If Marie & Werner can fall in love for the short time they were together, even though they were from two different sides of a war, the love I have for my wife & family can survive the 2-year period I am gone. I am now 4 of the way through my sentence & we still love &care for each other. We can make it the rest of the way.
