It took Doerr 10 years to write All the Light We Cannot See, and in between, he told me, he “procrastinated” by writing two other books. The thing about lyrical prose and tight plots is that they have a habit of hiding the work they took to produce. Vollmann found the book full of “flimsy types”, particularly when it came to the Nazis. In a review in the New York Times, for example, the novelist William T Vollmann called the book “more than a thriller and less than great literature”. This gives the impression of simplicity, and indeed the book was sometimes criticized for it. Doerr’s sentences are short and spare the chapters brief too. It is not sprawling or maximalist its pleasures come from how carefully and artfully Doerr commands plot and language. The novel has been praised in, among other publications, the Guardian as a “ page-turner”.īut Doerr’s book is not like your average great American novel, in part because it is a very lyrical piece of work. Without giving much away, these complementary qualities lead them on a clear path towards each other. The other, a German boy named Werner, is a whiz with radios. One, a French girl named Marie-Laure, is blind. All the Light We Cannot See follows two children whose fates are entwined by the second world war.
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