Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book with high hopes but wound up very disappointed. Although Doerr is trying to create a sweet and poignant narrative about survival during WWII, All the Light We Cannot See ultimately fails due to serious flaws in both content and style. I am a lifelong reader with a PhD in literature and 40 years experience teaching college writing and literature. The more I study fiction, the more I admire a writer who can use structure (the arrangement of the chronological elements of plot) strategically to develop the novel's themes. Some of the best examples of this technique are Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Anthony Doerr, on the other hand, fragments his plot for no apparent purpose. It is disjointed and difficult to follow, with no payoff for the effort. He not only switches back and forth between the two narratives but also along the timeline. Switching back and forth between the two narratives--the one about Marie Laure and the one about Werner--would have been plenty; also switching back and forth along the timeline before, during, and after WWII creates too much discontinuity and makes the narrative hard to follow, particularly the story of Marie Laure. The narrative of Werner, Frederick, and Volkheimer is easier to follow. Both plots also depend on too many farfetched coincidences, so much so that it strains credulity. In addition, the idea that Uncle Etienne would extend the length of his broadcasts to play music is totally unbelievable. There's no way he would have risked not only his own life and the lives of everyone in his household but also the lives of all the soldiers who depended on the information he was sending. The music makes for a nice story and helps connect the two plots, but it's basically nonsense. I made a timeline in an effort to follow the plots and connect them to the events of WWII, but couldn't make sense of them, so I really appreciate the review by Alexandra Grabbe on 12/18/14, which makes clear that his historical details are as inaccurate as his descriptive details. People have praised this book for its lush descriptions and evocative language, and those are things that I usually admire, too. Occasionally, the language and descriptions are beautiful and work well, but far too many of the descriptive passages use words as words--a piling on of sounds--rather than to convey actual meaning. For example, Doerr uses some truly absurd or exaggerated metaphors: Describing Marie Laure's eyes: ". . . those two eyes hang unmoving like the egg cases of spiders" (332) "A peaceful place, insulated by fields, enwombed by hedges" (356) "spiderwebs . . . crackle like burning paper when he moves" (428) the tongue of a boot "lolls cannibalistically" (317)--no logical connection to the rest of the situation or to the boot, which has lost its lace "six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl" (468)--I've given birth, and that's not what happens under normal circumstances. "In a delicatessen, black flies swim over a half dozen tables" (317)--There's no apparent reason to describe them as swimming rather than swarming. "His face gaunt and his teeth maniacal" (464) "Metallic, tattered moonlight shatters across the road . . ." (356) "The moonlight shines and billows" (482) Notice that some of these are just hard to picture (how does moonlight "shatter" or "billow"?) while others are just plain nonsense, as when the "spiderwebs [...] crackle like burning paper when he moves." Not even frozen spiderwebs "crackle." Speaking of spiders, there are more spiders in this book than I've encountered anywhere except that old horror movie, Arachnophobia. What little girl has eyes "like the egg cases of spiders"? And "enwombed by hedges"? Seriously? Doerr's style has other tics or mannerisms of style that are ineffective and distracting. For example, Doerr repeatedly uses sentences that follow this structure: The blanks blank and blank. Here are a few of the innumerable examples: "The branches seethe and clatter" (195) "things scuttle and slide" (458) "Her fingers dig and reach . . ." (232) "The dogs caper and sneeze . . ." (245) "the dogs freeze and twitch their noses . . . (246) "The dogs circle and duck and romp" (246) "mussels click and sigh" (260) "The wind gusts. In Marie-Laure's mind, it shifts and gleams . . ." (269) "The grasses toss and shimmy" (293) "The moonlight shines and billows" (482) "Silver tongs and spoons hanging from the cart chime and clank, and the wheels clatter and wallow" (108). "Hours wear out and fall away" (320) "a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air" (390) Some of his other mannerisms of style include using alliteration and other repetitions of sounds for the cumulative effect of the sounds themselves even though the meanings of the words sometimes don't actually make sense in the context; using a lot of fragments, usually participial modifiers with no conjugated verb, to add details; and using inverted word order way too frequently. Here are some examples: "swifts swoop out over the sunflowers" (337) "swifts swoop for insects, and the filaments of a spiderweb catch the light and shine for an instant and are gone" (436) "Sleet still falling outside" (219) [not a sentence] "A peaceful place, insulated by fields, enwombed by hedges" (357) [not a sentence] "Long fingers, a thatch of thinning hair beneath his cap" (317) [not a sentence] "streets narrow and sloping" (510) instead of "narrow, sloping streets," which would be more natural Finally, I don't know if I believe the claim that a person who went blind as a young child would see things in vivid color in her mind or have such concrete images of things she would not have seen or noticed prior to going blind. Doerr writes as though the descriptions are Marie Laure's mental images, but I don't find that realistic or convincing. He uses countless visual details that Marie Laure cannot see. He's apparently talking about what she imagines, I assume. He exaggerates Marie Laure's abilities to see and hear things in her mind (390-391). I'm still trying to figure out what the Pulitzer Prize committee saw in this book. Perhaps the best thing about it is that it portrays acts of courage and decency by people on both sides of the war.