Page 22 - Boca Club News - January '24

Page 22, Boca Club News

The Arts

Book Review: “All the Light We Cannot See”

By Nils A. Shapiro educated and self-sufficient as valuable objects, a priceless diamond the size of a robin’s egg
A funny thing happened to me on my possible. He introduces her to known as the “Sea of Flames” because of the red sparkle at
way to my computer this morning. I had the museum’s many collections, its heart, must not fall into the hands of the Nazis. In addition
planned to write a Film Review about buys her books in Braille and to the real diamond there are three almost identical fakes. The
one of the season’s most important and carves a remarkable miniature, real diamond is said to be cursed: The one who owns it will
long-awaited motion pictures: the film wooden scale model of every have eternal life, but all around him will suffer tragedy. Four
adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 street and building in their Paris of the museum’s managers will each take one of the stones,
award-winning World War Two novel, neighborhood so that she can but none of them will know who has the real diamond.
“All the Light We Cannot See,” which memorize it in order to make her As the Nazis invade France and approach Paris her father
is currently streaming as a four-part series on Netflix. way around alone, if necessary. escapes with Marie-Laure to Saint-Malo, a walled citadel on the
But I have decided instead to repeat here the very same On walks together she counts French coast. While there he carves another wooden scale model
Book Review that I wrote in August 2015—more than eight the steps: so many steps left to of this small town, complete with every street and building...
years ago—for a reason you will understand by the time you the corner...turn right so many and in the replica of the house in which they live he has hidden
have finished reading the following column. steps to the bakery...turn right something very valuable. Their experiences in Saint-Malo during
***** so many steps to the grocer...and so on. the occupation and through the Allied invasion of 1944 and into
The review this month is by way of a thank-you to my Werner Pfennig is a year older than Marie-Laure. An orphan, 1945 take up approximately half of the book.
daughters, Brett and Hillary, who sent this novel to me and at the age of seven he lives with his younger sister, Jutta, at a Meanwhile, young Werner’s increasing expertise in radio
insisted I read it, even though they know that my tastes usually home for children three hundred miles from Paris in a coal technology comes to the attention of the Nazis and he is taken
run more to nonfiction, and that its 530 pages are more than mining town near Essen, Germany. His father, like so many from the children’s home, away from his sister, and sent to a
the 350 or so that I usually set as my maximum because of the others, was a victim of a coal mining disaster, and when he grows military school. At first relieved to be freed from a future in the
limited amount of evenings and weekends time I have to devote older the future that he and those like him must look forward to coal mines, he soon finds himself being drilled in a system that
to my monthly “deadline” book reviews. will be descending into that same pit. Except for one fortunate demands brutality and violence against everything and everyone,
Having just turned the last page a moment ago, I can difference that is discovered quite by accident: It seems that including friends and family if need be, in the name of loyalty
readily understand why author Anthony Doerr’s latest novel Werner, for reasons that he himself cannot explain, has a natural to the fuehrer and Germany! It is a system that he tries to keep
was honored with the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the gift. One day when he is eight he finds an old radio, and the up with—in part out of fear, and because he doesn’t want to
2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, was music and magic that fill his ears opens up a whole new world be sent back to the mines—but he is torn apart in the process
shortlisted for the National Book Award, and was named as one to the boy. Then when the radio breaks and the sounds suddenly because, unlike the others, he is essentially decent. And what
of the year’s ten best books by The New York Times. stop, Werner carefully examines all of the wires and other parts, he faces now is a future as dark and bottomless in its own way
Of course, I needed no reminder that my daughters are as wanting desperately to have it work again. Finally he figures it as any coal mine. What ultimately saves him is his skill with
wise, thoughtful and generous as they are beautiful. out, his natural aptitude enabling a first basic understanding of radios, which is highly valuable to the Nazis.
“All the Light We Cannot See” is the story of two very radio engineering that will prove to be his passport out of that Werner’s story—witnessing the contradiction between
different people, the separate circumstances in which they coal mining town and into an entirely different future. Nazi propaganda of their army’s great victories even as the
experience one of history’s most devastating events, and how But it is now the late 1930s, and the Nazi war machine has devastation and corpses pile up around him while he serves in
their lives eventually intersect in a dramatic and profound way. begun to roll across Europe. For ten-year-old Marie-Laure Russia and then retreats across Europe into France and, finally,
Marie-Laure Leblanc is a young French girl who, in 1934, and her father the imminent invasion of France means that Saint-Malo—takes up most of the other half of the book. One
loses her sight from congenital cataracts at the age of six. they must leave Paris and try to hide at her uncle, Etienne’s, of Werner’s most important assignments is to determine the
With her mother having died earlier, her very loving father—a house in the quieter coastal town of Saint-Malo. Before he location of radio broadcasts, especially those being sent by the
master locksmith at the Paris Museum of Natural History—uses leaves, Monsieur Leblanc makes a secret arrangement with
all his knowledge and skills to help Marie-Laure become as the museum. They have agreed that one of the museum’s most Book Review on page 23

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