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All the Light We Cannot See post by Dolly

Parker's blog response  September 29, 2015 to Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See

As I will not be there until 4 today, here are my observations on Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See.
 Despite the 500 plus pages, this was virtually a one-sitting read. Not often am I so completely absorbed in a novel and felt as if I had stepped into a different world and time.  Doerr blends layered storytelling, a detailed geographic setting (check out St. Malo and the Paris streets around the Jardin des Plantes on Google maps) and the historical setting of the Nazi invasion of France in the Second World War with characters whose lives are thrown into disarray, but through their own curiosity and intelligence, seemingly disparate individuals manage to circumnavigate the carnage unfolding around them to create a deeply resonating arc that bridges the world that was imploding around them. The plot is simple: the curator at the Museum of Natural History in Paris must hide its treasures before Goering and his minions  cherry picked the best for his own personal collection or Hitler's Fuhermuseum in Linz. Three fakes are made of a rare, fairly-tale enshrouded diamond are created and sent into away to be safely guarded until such time as peace once again reins in the kingdom, also known as Europe. The spanner in the works is that none of the three diamond saviors knows who is carrying the authentic stone. To continue on the same vein of good and evil, a Nazi diamond jeweler (Doerr notes how this field had been eradicated of its skilled members) upon learning that he has cancer succumbs to the mythical healing properties associated with the diamond and obsessive combs the trail to its whereabouts. Like the tides, he follows on the flood of the invasion of France, the collapse of the Maginot Line, the blitzkrieg and the fall of Paris, only to grasp helplessly at his goal as the waters recede with the success of  D Day.
 
I know I'm rambling on and have yet to talk about the characters of Marie- Laure and Werner, her gift of sight and his of sound, and the spiritual synethesia created through  a spiritual connection, only to innocently flame and quickly extinguish. Their story reminds me of jacquard weaving; their lives are the systematically raised warp threads that rises above the patterns of greed, destruction and hopeless that grasped the world. The miniature worlds created by Marie-Laure's father for her to learn to navigate the world are more than quaint and charming. In one sense they are the streets of all our lives, where with wise and careful precision and a healthy dash of curiosity we open the door to a rich and rewarding life, one not always hallowed, but one most poignantly worth living.


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