Mrs. LaClair and I spoke before vacation about the pros and cons of this blog assignment. Having read a book and blogged about it over the course of the last five weeks, I feel like something of an expert on the subject.
There are many advantages to blogging about an AP Lit. book, beginning with the inherent factor of creativity. The style of a traditional high school literature class—reading an assigned book as a class, discussing it, then righting an essay about it—is tried and true, but it's also tired and trite. That's why mixing it up by allowing students to choose a book of their choice and respond to it in a much more individualized way is beneficial; it refreshes our ideas about how to analyze literature and awakens us from our February slump.
It's true that the group discussion factor, which is important for many students, is mostly lost in the blogging assignment. I always walk away from seminars with new ideas and fresh insights thanks to my exposure to twenty other students' opinions. But a con of that method of reading a book is that it sometimes allows students to fall back and allow others to do the grunt work. When one has to come up with one's own original ideas every week and express them in written form, there is little to no room for slacking—the pressure's on.
That's why blogging is intense. It feels like journalism—there's a finite subject and a deadline by which the writer must address it. This requires the blogger to manage his time wisely, think critically about the work he is doing while he is doing it, and produce a finished product that is creative and original. If AP classes are meant to prepare us for college, then this assignment addresses the intensely individual aspect of many students' higher education experience; there's no handholding.
That's not to say that there isn't room for conversation. Each week, my blog posts improved—or at least changed—because I was exposed to others' blogs. Studying my fellow All the Light We Cannot See readers' posts helped me to consider other viewpoints of the meaning of the subject at hand, while reading posts by those who tackled other books helped me to evaluate the content of my blog from a more objective perspective. By commenting and responding to comments, bloggers are able to foster an intellectually stimulating environment in which ideas are challenged, thus strengthening everyone's arguments in the future. The blog assignment, then, strikes a rare and special balance; it allows—in fact, requires—originality, but it also leaves room for healthy and constructive collaboration.
Reading All the Light We Cannot See helped me to understand some of the potential shortcomings of this assignment. For self-evident starters, length matters here more than ever: 500+ pages is just too much. I wanted to take time with my reading, but, unfortunately, I was often forced to rush to get the required amount of reading done by the deadline. This is nobody's fault but mine; I opted to read the book and suffered the consequences. I would urge future readers to carefully consider what they're getting into when they pick a lengthy book, even if it isn't dense (All the Light is certainly a page-turner—not just because of its gripping plot, but also because each chapter consists of roughly half a page of text, so, by necessity, one must turn the pages frequently.)
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but there was only so much to analyze in this book. I needed to read a book like Americanah—accessible to someone blogging alone, but not so easy that he runs out of material. In other words, I needed to find the happy medium between All the Light and, say, Song of Solomon, which would have been a disaster—an utter waste of time and energy—to read for this assignment.
Is the blog assignment worth keeping? Absolutely. Should it dominate a yearlong curriculum? Absolutely not. If you want that, try VLACS—which, in my experience, lacks the most fundamental aspect of education: communication. Blogging about one or two books is a great idea, because it gives students the chance to approach analyzing literature in new ways. The assignment challenges them to think outside the box, taking others' varying approaches into consideration all the while. Students should heed my warning about book selection, though; just because you've always wanted to read it doesn't mean that now is the time.
Thanks for reading.
Sunday, March 5, 2017
Thursday, February 23, 2017
All the Meaning I'm Trying to See
Pgs. 392-530
Addressed in this post: the meaning of the work as a whole.
While reading All the Light We Cannot See, I spent more time thinking about whether or not the book is AP-worthy than its underlying meanings. It sometimes felt like Doerr had written the novel to give me a hard time; I vacillated between chiding myself for looking down at the novel from my unearned perch of AP snobbery and giving literary credit where it wasn't due. But, now that I've finally closed the book (for good—more on that later), I can try to analyze its meaning—a more appropriate use of valuable AP time, no doubt.
Let's start here: All the Light We Cannot See is a good book. I know I'm not supposed to say that, because, dear reader, why would you care what I think about the quality of the book? You're here for analysis. But part of me feels like I have to preface that analysis with some compliments, which truly aren't contrived: the writing is impressive, the characters are adequately flawed, and the balance between historical fiction and popular narrative works exceedingly well.
But the book's shortcomings are hard to ignore. The glaringly obvious one is von Rumpel, the German gemologist whose Scooby Doo-esque side plot comprises a separate novel's worth in pages. Von Rumpel drives an important aspect of the main plot, but his story—which is really about the Sea of Flames—is heavy-handed and often superfluous. Other aspects of the plot, such as the generational storyline that ties the book up in a neat little knot, also feel clunky and out of place.
Let's not waste time grappling with pesky distractions, though (I'll analyze book reviews with similar and differing viewpoints in the final post—watch this space.) Werner and Marie-Laure have quite the finales in this section. Will was right, and I was wrong—they meet, when Werner's battalion comes to France at the height of the war. He is dispatched to—you guessed it—Saint-Malo, where he traces a notorious radio network of the French Resistance to Marie-Laure and Etienne. I appreciate the closure of the radio motif (I addressed this in the first blog post); readers get the sense that communication, especially among the seemingly powerless, is vital. That's a decent mini-meaning.
For those blog readers who haven't read All the Light, I won't divulge the ending of the ending. Let's just say it involves death. It isn't happy, by any means, but it isn't tragic, either, and it's nowhere close to surprising. The truly dramatic portion of the denouement, though, is the moment when Werner arrives on the shore of France, as opposed to what follows. In other words, what makes the ending—and, by extension, the novel—work is the characters' unifying sense of hope, not their shared despair.
All the Light We Cannot See is, above all, about hope. We see it in the energy that fuels Madame Manec to lead a local chapter of the French Resistance; in Frau Elena's love for the children she raised; in the motivation of Etienne to launch a Resistance radio station; in Daniel and Jutta's letters, the very sending of which demonstrates their undying belief in their relatives' security; in the excitement that Hauptmann, Werner's teacher, expresses when he finds out that his student is a math genius; and in Marie-Laure and Werner's quest for some semblance of safety and happiness. These characters are of different ideologies, classes, and nationalities, and they have different temperaments, priorities, and life experiences, but they share an unmitigated sense of hope for a better life. Despite their circumstances, which range from undesirable to unbearable, they move onward, appearing to think of the war as a temporary beast that must, and will, be overcome. They just need to maintain hope.
Somewhere in there, I think, is that elusive creature: the meaning of the work as a whole. Doerr's idea is that hope knows no borders. This theme is expressed most eloquently at the moment Werner arrives in Saint-Malo. He hasn't yet met Marie-Laure; their lives are worlds apart, but their similarities are symbolized by their coincidental geographic proximity. This unity is expressed slightly later in the book, when Marie-Laure muses on the young man talking to her: "He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne," she thinks, referring to Werner. "He is everyone who has left her family finally coming back." Then, crossing the great divide, Werner tells her, "'I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.'"
Teary yet?
So, yes, I was wrong. The sappy ending I worried about happens, but it isn't sappy at all (at least not this part); it's poetic, sweet, and at once optimistic and painful. It's a perfect ending to a deeply imperfect novel. But, more than anything, its a just expression of a theme with lessons for every reader.
Addressed in this post: the meaning of the work as a whole.
While reading All the Light We Cannot See, I spent more time thinking about whether or not the book is AP-worthy than its underlying meanings. It sometimes felt like Doerr had written the novel to give me a hard time; I vacillated between chiding myself for looking down at the novel from my unearned perch of AP snobbery and giving literary credit where it wasn't due. But, now that I've finally closed the book (for good—more on that later), I can try to analyze its meaning—a more appropriate use of valuable AP time, no doubt.
Let's start here: All the Light We Cannot See is a good book. I know I'm not supposed to say that, because, dear reader, why would you care what I think about the quality of the book? You're here for analysis. But part of me feels like I have to preface that analysis with some compliments, which truly aren't contrived: the writing is impressive, the characters are adequately flawed, and the balance between historical fiction and popular narrative works exceedingly well.
But the book's shortcomings are hard to ignore. The glaringly obvious one is von Rumpel, the German gemologist whose Scooby Doo-esque side plot comprises a separate novel's worth in pages. Von Rumpel drives an important aspect of the main plot, but his story—which is really about the Sea of Flames—is heavy-handed and often superfluous. Other aspects of the plot, such as the generational storyline that ties the book up in a neat little knot, also feel clunky and out of place.
Let's not waste time grappling with pesky distractions, though (I'll analyze book reviews with similar and differing viewpoints in the final post—watch this space.) Werner and Marie-Laure have quite the finales in this section. Will was right, and I was wrong—they meet, when Werner's battalion comes to France at the height of the war. He is dispatched to—you guessed it—Saint-Malo, where he traces a notorious radio network of the French Resistance to Marie-Laure and Etienne. I appreciate the closure of the radio motif (I addressed this in the first blog post); readers get the sense that communication, especially among the seemingly powerless, is vital. That's a decent mini-meaning.
For those blog readers who haven't read All the Light, I won't divulge the ending of the ending. Let's just say it involves death. It isn't happy, by any means, but it isn't tragic, either, and it's nowhere close to surprising. The truly dramatic portion of the denouement, though, is the moment when Werner arrives on the shore of France, as opposed to what follows. In other words, what makes the ending—and, by extension, the novel—work is the characters' unifying sense of hope, not their shared despair.
All the Light We Cannot See is, above all, about hope. We see it in the energy that fuels Madame Manec to lead a local chapter of the French Resistance; in Frau Elena's love for the children she raised; in the motivation of Etienne to launch a Resistance radio station; in Daniel and Jutta's letters, the very sending of which demonstrates their undying belief in their relatives' security; in the excitement that Hauptmann, Werner's teacher, expresses when he finds out that his student is a math genius; and in Marie-Laure and Werner's quest for some semblance of safety and happiness. These characters are of different ideologies, classes, and nationalities, and they have different temperaments, priorities, and life experiences, but they share an unmitigated sense of hope for a better life. Despite their circumstances, which range from undesirable to unbearable, they move onward, appearing to think of the war as a temporary beast that must, and will, be overcome. They just need to maintain hope.
Somewhere in there, I think, is that elusive creature: the meaning of the work as a whole. Doerr's idea is that hope knows no borders. This theme is expressed most eloquently at the moment Werner arrives in Saint-Malo. He hasn't yet met Marie-Laure; their lives are worlds apart, but their similarities are symbolized by their coincidental geographic proximity. This unity is expressed slightly later in the book, when Marie-Laure muses on the young man talking to her: "He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne," she thinks, referring to Werner. "He is everyone who has left her family finally coming back." Then, crossing the great divide, Werner tells her, "'I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.'"
Teary yet?
So, yes, I was wrong. The sappy ending I worried about happens, but it isn't sappy at all (at least not this part); it's poetic, sweet, and at once optimistic and painful. It's a perfect ending to a deeply imperfect novel. But, more than anything, its a just expression of a theme with lessons for every reader.
Monday, February 13, 2017
All the Books We Call AP
Pgs. 250-393
Addressed in this post: style & why AP?
Each portion of All the Light We Cannot See seems to center around at least one tragedy; in the third quarter of the book, we witness the death of Madame Manec, Etienne's beloved maid.
Madame Manec serves as a sort of mother figure for Marie-Laure, who, with her father gone, is parentless. She is also a political role model; her admirable efforts to organize a resistance against the Nazis, who occupy France, demonstrates her courage. When Manec dies of Pneumonia, Etienne and Marie-Laure—along with a hefty percentage of Saint-Malo—mourn a particularly devastating loss. "Madame is dead, Madame is dead," a shocked Etienne repeats.
This passage is followed by a letter from Daniel, who tells his daughter that "joy is not a strong enough word" for the feeling he had when receiving the basic necessities she sent him months before. Though Daniel acknowledges the difficulty of his situation—"How I wish they would let us have soap!"—the fact that he, an imprisoned man, is happier than her, still free to some degree in Saint-Malo, is an ironic exhibition of the complex impacts of war.
Daniel's letter is one of many that Doerr employs to progress his narrative; Werner also writes and receives letters, to and from an increasingly disheartened Jutta. A single letter, in most cases, comprises an entire chapter. This isn't abnormal for the book; the chapters are rarely longer than three or four pages. This element of Doerr's structure contributes significantly to the style of the book. When we read short chapters, especially those that shift perspective, we are able to more adequately connect the characters. For example, later in this passage, Marie-Laure, Etienne, and Werner all have separate experiences with radios, and the short chapters help to illuminate what makes their seemingly distinct experiences similar: Werner and Marie-Laure both feel trapped in their respective environs, and their relationships with their radios help to liberate them temporarily. This idea comes full circle when Werner, "trapped beneath whatever is left of the Hotel of Bees," hears Marie-Laure reading Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on the makeshift network that her uncle has managed to establish (after Madame Manec's death, Etienne turns into something of a disc jockey, playing music to distract him from the deterioration of his world.)
But the uncommonly brief chapters sometimes limit the extent to which we are able to sympathize with the characters, because we are not permitted to fully immerse ourselves in their experiences. Readers can best understand and relate to characters' struggles when they become engrossed in long, often messy passages that display a train of thought or a stream of consciousness. This limitation is hindered, not helped, but Doerr's use of third person narration, which further inhibits our ability to get inside our characters' minds. (I'm not suggesting that this is the case for all third person narration—only that which is coupled with short chapters that are comprised mostly of dialogue and brief descriptions.)
The short chapters are reminiscent of a young adult or popular fiction read. That idea is hard to ignore when one considers whether this book is "of AP merit"—a loaded and delightfully snobby phrase. One must first establish that not all AP-worthy books are created equal; to suggest that Doerr must be held to the same standard as Toni Morrison, or that Morrison must be equated with Shakespeare, is absurd. But one has to draw the line somewhere, and that line gets blurry around the territory of All the Light We Cannot See, which at times can feel like a beach read, and nothing more.
But our perspective on what is "of AP merit" is faulty regarding books published, say, in the last ten years. We know what won the National Book Award, the Man Booker Prize, or the Pulitzer (cough, cough), but we don't know what works will endure—what will be considered classics of our era.
A good indicator might be the question, "Would we teach this to our kids in English class?" All the Light We Cannot See certainly has historical merit. Doerr develops characters in a manner that might be called original, or even inventive. Motifs aren't as plentiful as they are in, say, Song of Solomon, but they're there—radios, death, entrapment. In the end, these traits elevate the work to the AP level.
One wonders, however whether reading this instead of a work by Morrison (or Atwood, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Conrad, Joyce...) is a justifiable use of valuable AP time (the exam is nigh!) Some might say that adding a book published in the last ten years to the curriculum is a good idea; I agree. But I wonder if All the Light is the best that our millennium has to offer—what about Americanah? The Namesake? White Teeth?
But maybe I'm just in search of a book that would easily lend itself to essay prompts. Those last three—chalk-full of tried and true AP favorites like identity, relationships, politics, and the past—seem like they were written to be written about.
All the Light? Not so much. But the jury's still out.
Each portion of All the Light We Cannot See seems to center around at least one tragedy; in the third quarter of the book, we witness the death of Madame Manec, Etienne's beloved maid.
Madame Manec serves as a sort of mother figure for Marie-Laure, who, with her father gone, is parentless. She is also a political role model; her admirable efforts to organize a resistance against the Nazis, who occupy France, demonstrates her courage. When Manec dies of Pneumonia, Etienne and Marie-Laure—along with a hefty percentage of Saint-Malo—mourn a particularly devastating loss. "Madame is dead, Madame is dead," a shocked Etienne repeats.
This passage is followed by a letter from Daniel, who tells his daughter that "joy is not a strong enough word" for the feeling he had when receiving the basic necessities she sent him months before. Though Daniel acknowledges the difficulty of his situation—"How I wish they would let us have soap!"—the fact that he, an imprisoned man, is happier than her, still free to some degree in Saint-Malo, is an ironic exhibition of the complex impacts of war.
Daniel's letter is one of many that Doerr employs to progress his narrative; Werner also writes and receives letters, to and from an increasingly disheartened Jutta. A single letter, in most cases, comprises an entire chapter. This isn't abnormal for the book; the chapters are rarely longer than three or four pages. This element of Doerr's structure contributes significantly to the style of the book. When we read short chapters, especially those that shift perspective, we are able to more adequately connect the characters. For example, later in this passage, Marie-Laure, Etienne, and Werner all have separate experiences with radios, and the short chapters help to illuminate what makes their seemingly distinct experiences similar: Werner and Marie-Laure both feel trapped in their respective environs, and their relationships with their radios help to liberate them temporarily. This idea comes full circle when Werner, "trapped beneath whatever is left of the Hotel of Bees," hears Marie-Laure reading Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on the makeshift network that her uncle has managed to establish (after Madame Manec's death, Etienne turns into something of a disc jockey, playing music to distract him from the deterioration of his world.)
But the uncommonly brief chapters sometimes limit the extent to which we are able to sympathize with the characters, because we are not permitted to fully immerse ourselves in their experiences. Readers can best understand and relate to characters' struggles when they become engrossed in long, often messy passages that display a train of thought or a stream of consciousness. This limitation is hindered, not helped, but Doerr's use of third person narration, which further inhibits our ability to get inside our characters' minds. (I'm not suggesting that this is the case for all third person narration—only that which is coupled with short chapters that are comprised mostly of dialogue and brief descriptions.)
The short chapters are reminiscent of a young adult or popular fiction read. That idea is hard to ignore when one considers whether this book is "of AP merit"—a loaded and delightfully snobby phrase. One must first establish that not all AP-worthy books are created equal; to suggest that Doerr must be held to the same standard as Toni Morrison, or that Morrison must be equated with Shakespeare, is absurd. But one has to draw the line somewhere, and that line gets blurry around the territory of All the Light We Cannot See, which at times can feel like a beach read, and nothing more.
But our perspective on what is "of AP merit" is faulty regarding books published, say, in the last ten years. We know what won the National Book Award, the Man Booker Prize, or the Pulitzer (cough, cough), but we don't know what works will endure—what will be considered classics of our era.
A good indicator might be the question, "Would we teach this to our kids in English class?" All the Light We Cannot See certainly has historical merit. Doerr develops characters in a manner that might be called original, or even inventive. Motifs aren't as plentiful as they are in, say, Song of Solomon, but they're there—radios, death, entrapment. In the end, these traits elevate the work to the AP level.
One wonders, however whether reading this instead of a work by Morrison (or Atwood, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Conrad, Joyce...) is a justifiable use of valuable AP time (the exam is nigh!) Some might say that adding a book published in the last ten years to the curriculum is a good idea; I agree. But I wonder if All the Light is the best that our millennium has to offer—what about Americanah? The Namesake? White Teeth?
But maybe I'm just in search of a book that would easily lend itself to essay prompts. Those last three—chalk-full of tried and true AP favorites like identity, relationships, politics, and the past—seem like they were written to be written about.
All the Light? Not so much. But the jury's still out.
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
The Trouble With Werner
Pgs. 130-250
Addressed in this post: characters
We know from a certain TED Talk that a single story can be dangerous.
That's why the varying perspectives—similar in some ways, totally unalike in others—in All the Light We Cannot See are refreshing. Doerr's experimentation with how readers are supposed to feel about various aspects of the plot is not limited to the protagonists, Marie-Laure and Werner; he includes the points of view of other characters, such as Marie-Laure's father, Werner's friend, and a mysterious gemologist whose relationship to the main plot is often hazy.
It's hard to argue that Marie-Laure isn't likable. She's intelligent, generous, and kindhearted, despite life having been more than unfair to her. We root for her success and feel disheartened when things don't go her way—an instance that, despite her and her father's best efforts, takes place often (more often than it should in a child's life).
But Werner is a different story. In this section, we follow his character's academic and social ascent. As the world deteriorates, Werner's life is steadily improving; he floors a teacher with his knowledge of trigonometry and makes a friend, Frederick. We get a sense of his newfound wonder—his own internal Renaissance—when Frederick takes him on an excursion home, to Berlin:
"The largest city Werner has ever seen... Berlin! The very name like two sharp bells of glory. Capital of science, seat of the führer, nursery to Bohr, Einstein, Staudinger, Bayer. Somewhere in these streets, plastic was invented, X-rays were discovered, continental drift was identified. What marvels does science cultivate here now?"
Perspective, then, is everything: to most of the world in the early 1940s, the seat of the führer hardly looks like a desirable destination. But to Werner, there is no place more magical on Earth. The dark irony here is worth noting; while Werner values the science—the technological progressivism—that he associates with Berlin, nothing could be further from the agenda of the regime currently based in this city. After all, three of the scientists Werner mentioned were Jewish, and the fourth was married to a Jewish woman; surely Berlin is no place for them now.
Maybe Werner's distinct plight causes us to sympathize more with him than with Marie-Laure. At the very least, we perceive the characters differently because we think we understand the context of their struggles. With Werner, though, Doerr urges us to think outside of the box.
Another perspective that Doerr explores is that of Daniel LeBlanc, Marie-Laure's father. It's difficult to think of a person—fictional or real—who demonstrates his love for his daughter in a more sweet and genuine way than Daniel. From the start of the book, when he constructed a scale model of his Parisian neighborhood for his blind daughter to familiarize herself with, Daniel earns our respect and admiration.
Toward the end of this passage, Daniel, imprisoned in Germany, sends Marie-Laure a letter, in which he writes,
"Dearest Marie-Laure...I've managed to find an angel who will try to get this to you...You are not going to believe this, but you will have to trust me—they serve us wonderful food. First-class...I so look forward to the meals!...Be polite to your uncle and Madame too. Thank them for reading this to you. And know that I am always with you, that I am right beside you. Your Papa."
We hardly believe that the positive, even ideal, scene that Daniel illustrates is factual. But the purpose of his letter is to provide her daughter, who misses her only immediate family member dearly, with some comfort. This is about as far as we can get into Daniel's head, because chapters aren't narrated from his perspective, as in the cases of Marie-Laure and Werner. In a world that is cruel to Marie-Laure, Daniel serves as a kind of salve—a figure whom we know will always be there for his daughter, no matter what. That's what makes his disappearance all the more unbearable.
Meanwhile, Marie-Laure, in Saint-Malo with her uncle, Etienne, and Madame Manec, hopes for good news and receives nothing but more hardship. Early in this passage, she "sits at the square table, a plate of cookies in front of her," and watches through the kitchen window "the wit wit wit of a barn swallow, footfalls on ramparts, halyards clinking against masts, hinges and chains creaking in the harbor. Ghosts. Germans."
Is one of those Germans Werner? Not literally, of course, though it wouldn't be a surprise to find Werner shipped to the front lines of Germany's battle in France, Poland, or elsewhere. But Marie-Laure's paranoia raises an interesting question: will our two protagonists ever meet? So far, Doerr has done a masterful job keeping sappiness out of his deeply emotional work. If he crosses Marie-Laure's path with Werner's, I'm confident he'll do so in a nuanced, carefully calibrated fashion. For example, I don't think the two will fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, turning the complex storyline into a stale cliché.
We can only hope that Doerr will maintain the complexity—challenging and frustrating because such a style often lacks closure—that he established in the first half of the book.
Note: There is no "tab" function available in Blogger, so block quotes are in quotations to mark their distinction.
Addressed in this post: characters
We know from a certain TED Talk that a single story can be dangerous.
That's why the varying perspectives—similar in some ways, totally unalike in others—in All the Light We Cannot See are refreshing. Doerr's experimentation with how readers are supposed to feel about various aspects of the plot is not limited to the protagonists, Marie-Laure and Werner; he includes the points of view of other characters, such as Marie-Laure's father, Werner's friend, and a mysterious gemologist whose relationship to the main plot is often hazy.
It's hard to argue that Marie-Laure isn't likable. She's intelligent, generous, and kindhearted, despite life having been more than unfair to her. We root for her success and feel disheartened when things don't go her way—an instance that, despite her and her father's best efforts, takes place often (more often than it should in a child's life).
But Werner is a different story. In this section, we follow his character's academic and social ascent. As the world deteriorates, Werner's life is steadily improving; he floors a teacher with his knowledge of trigonometry and makes a friend, Frederick. We get a sense of his newfound wonder—his own internal Renaissance—when Frederick takes him on an excursion home, to Berlin:
"The largest city Werner has ever seen... Berlin! The very name like two sharp bells of glory. Capital of science, seat of the führer, nursery to Bohr, Einstein, Staudinger, Bayer. Somewhere in these streets, plastic was invented, X-rays were discovered, continental drift was identified. What marvels does science cultivate here now?"
Perspective, then, is everything: to most of the world in the early 1940s, the seat of the führer hardly looks like a desirable destination. But to Werner, there is no place more magical on Earth. The dark irony here is worth noting; while Werner values the science—the technological progressivism—that he associates with Berlin, nothing could be further from the agenda of the regime currently based in this city. After all, three of the scientists Werner mentioned were Jewish, and the fourth was married to a Jewish woman; surely Berlin is no place for them now.
Maybe Werner's distinct plight causes us to sympathize more with him than with Marie-Laure. At the very least, we perceive the characters differently because we think we understand the context of their struggles. With Werner, though, Doerr urges us to think outside of the box.
Another perspective that Doerr explores is that of Daniel LeBlanc, Marie-Laure's father. It's difficult to think of a person—fictional or real—who demonstrates his love for his daughter in a more sweet and genuine way than Daniel. From the start of the book, when he constructed a scale model of his Parisian neighborhood for his blind daughter to familiarize herself with, Daniel earns our respect and admiration.
Toward the end of this passage, Daniel, imprisoned in Germany, sends Marie-Laure a letter, in which he writes,
"Dearest Marie-Laure...I've managed to find an angel who will try to get this to you...You are not going to believe this, but you will have to trust me—they serve us wonderful food. First-class...I so look forward to the meals!...Be polite to your uncle and Madame too. Thank them for reading this to you. And know that I am always with you, that I am right beside you. Your Papa."
We hardly believe that the positive, even ideal, scene that Daniel illustrates is factual. But the purpose of his letter is to provide her daughter, who misses her only immediate family member dearly, with some comfort. This is about as far as we can get into Daniel's head, because chapters aren't narrated from his perspective, as in the cases of Marie-Laure and Werner. In a world that is cruel to Marie-Laure, Daniel serves as a kind of salve—a figure whom we know will always be there for his daughter, no matter what. That's what makes his disappearance all the more unbearable.
Meanwhile, Marie-Laure, in Saint-Malo with her uncle, Etienne, and Madame Manec, hopes for good news and receives nothing but more hardship. Early in this passage, she "sits at the square table, a plate of cookies in front of her," and watches through the kitchen window "the wit wit wit of a barn swallow, footfalls on ramparts, halyards clinking against masts, hinges and chains creaking in the harbor. Ghosts. Germans."
Is one of those Germans Werner? Not literally, of course, though it wouldn't be a surprise to find Werner shipped to the front lines of Germany's battle in France, Poland, or elsewhere. But Marie-Laure's paranoia raises an interesting question: will our two protagonists ever meet? So far, Doerr has done a masterful job keeping sappiness out of his deeply emotional work. If he crosses Marie-Laure's path with Werner's, I'm confident he'll do so in a nuanced, carefully calibrated fashion. For example, I don't think the two will fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after, turning the complex storyline into a stale cliché.
We can only hope that Doerr will maintain the complexity—challenging and frustrating because such a style often lacks closure—that he established in the first half of the book.
Note: There is no "tab" function available in Blogger, so block quotes are in quotations to mark their distinction.
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Two Worlds
Pgs. 1-130
The second of the two epigraphs preceding the first section of All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, reads, "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without radio."
In Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set in France and Germany before and during World War II, radio plays a complex role: it is at once an enabler and an inhibitor. As the vital method of communication of the era (see: fireside chats across the pond), the radio is integral in connecting the French and German people to the dramatic changes occurring in the world around them. The epigraph, for example, is attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, who helped facilitate the rise of the Nazi Party through his carefully crafted radio addresses to the German people.
But for Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is eight years old at the onset of the story, the radio is more personal than political; the most important aspect of his relationship with his short-wave radio is not the headlines he hears on it, but the doors that it opens for him. Without his radio, which he found on the street and salvaged out of intuition, Werner is destitute—no parents, no money, no real education.
Meanwhile, in France, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, Doerr's other protagonist, and Werner's foil, is in something of a contrary quandary. Though she has a supportive and loving father, Daniel, and the world of the Paris museum where he works at her disposal, she is blind by the age of six. Her inhibition, then, is markedly physical. Daniel cares so deeply about his daughter's happiness that he builds her a scale replica of their neighborhood so that she can become familiar with her surroundings.
These impediments alone earn readers' sympathy within the first few chapters. But with World War II soon in full swing, Marie-Laure and her father, along with Werner and his sister, Jutta, have bigger fish to fry. When the Nazis invade France, Daniel resolves to bring his daughter away from the imminent danger in Paris, and, toward the end of this section, the two flee to the walled city of Saint-Malo, on France's northwestern coast.
In Germany, whose institutions have eroded under history's most notorious authoritarian, Werner passes a series of rigorous tests and quickly ascends the ranks of Hitler Youth. A conflict quickly emerges: how are readers supposed to feel about Werner at this point? We have been led to sympathize with him, and we understand that he really has no choice. He is, after all, eight years old, and therefore cannot comprehend the meaning of the Nazis' rise. In a later post, I'll elaborate on how readers approach Werner's precarious position.
Thus All the Light We Cannot See presents a historical dichotomy. On the one hand, we have Marie-Laure and her father, who, if they make it out of the war alive, will be on the side of the victors. On the other hand, we have Werner, who has unwittingly joined the ranks of one of the century's most brutal regime.
But Werner has his radio—his conduit to a world beyond his own. "How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house," Doerr writes. "While the other children play hopscotch in the alley or swim in the canal, Werner sits alone in his upstairs dormer, experimenting with the radio receiver. In a week he can dismantle and rebuild it with his eyes closed....Nothing he's encountered before has made so much sense." The radio gives Werner structure, just as it gave the Nazis a backbone. "It ties a million ears to a single mouth," Doerr muses. As the story progresses, it will be interesting to see to what extent Werner and Marie-Laure's own lives are determined by their harsh worlds and to what extent they are able to shape their fates.
The second of the two epigraphs preceding the first section of All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, reads, "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without radio."
In Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set in France and Germany before and during World War II, radio plays a complex role: it is at once an enabler and an inhibitor. As the vital method of communication of the era (see: fireside chats across the pond), the radio is integral in connecting the French and German people to the dramatic changes occurring in the world around them. The epigraph, for example, is attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, who helped facilitate the rise of the Nazi Party through his carefully crafted radio addresses to the German people.
But for Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is eight years old at the onset of the story, the radio is more personal than political; the most important aspect of his relationship with his short-wave radio is not the headlines he hears on it, but the doors that it opens for him. Without his radio, which he found on the street and salvaged out of intuition, Werner is destitute—no parents, no money, no real education.
Meanwhile, in France, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, Doerr's other protagonist, and Werner's foil, is in something of a contrary quandary. Though she has a supportive and loving father, Daniel, and the world of the Paris museum where he works at her disposal, she is blind by the age of six. Her inhibition, then, is markedly physical. Daniel cares so deeply about his daughter's happiness that he builds her a scale replica of their neighborhood so that she can become familiar with her surroundings.
These impediments alone earn readers' sympathy within the first few chapters. But with World War II soon in full swing, Marie-Laure and her father, along with Werner and his sister, Jutta, have bigger fish to fry. When the Nazis invade France, Daniel resolves to bring his daughter away from the imminent danger in Paris, and, toward the end of this section, the two flee to the walled city of Saint-Malo, on France's northwestern coast.
In Germany, whose institutions have eroded under history's most notorious authoritarian, Werner passes a series of rigorous tests and quickly ascends the ranks of Hitler Youth. A conflict quickly emerges: how are readers supposed to feel about Werner at this point? We have been led to sympathize with him, and we understand that he really has no choice. He is, after all, eight years old, and therefore cannot comprehend the meaning of the Nazis' rise. In a later post, I'll elaborate on how readers approach Werner's precarious position.
Thus All the Light We Cannot See presents a historical dichotomy. On the one hand, we have Marie-Laure and her father, who, if they make it out of the war alive, will be on the side of the victors. On the other hand, we have Werner, who has unwittingly joined the ranks of one of the century's most brutal regime.
But Werner has his radio—his conduit to a world beyond his own. "How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house," Doerr writes. "While the other children play hopscotch in the alley or swim in the canal, Werner sits alone in his upstairs dormer, experimenting with the radio receiver. In a week he can dismantle and rebuild it with his eyes closed....Nothing he's encountered before has made so much sense." The radio gives Werner structure, just as it gave the Nazis a backbone. "It ties a million ears to a single mouth," Doerr muses. As the story progresses, it will be interesting to see to what extent Werner and Marie-Laure's own lives are determined by their harsh worlds and to what extent they are able to shape their fates.
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