Date: 23 August 2015
Location: Pat & Carol
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon as the Happy Bookers met once again to discuss our latest reading. We were especially happy to have our Atlanta bookers, Mike and Nancy, joining us for the meeting – we don’t get to see these good friends nearly often enough.
Our book this month was Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See for which Doerr was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This is a big novel. Even so, most of us had read it all the way through, with just a few who had not yet finished. It appeared that we all enjoyed the novel, which is a little unusual for a long, serious book; normally at least someone will complain that the author rambled on-and-on about something, but I didn’t hear that with this work.
The story opens during the Nazi occupation of the French coastal city of St. Malo. Even though WW II figures prominently in the story, it is not exactly a war novel. It is more about the lives of the two main characters: the blind French girl Marie-Laure and the German soldier Werner. Their stories are told mainly through a series of flash-backs–all leading up to their meeting during the chaos following the allied bombing of the French city.
There are episodes of palpable tension throughout the novel, and we all agreed that the depiction of Germany leading up to the war was distressing. Why did the good citizens of Germany not do something to stop this catarophe? The depiction of the Werner’s Nazi-oriented school was particularly disturbing, and the treament of the students who did not fit in, especially Frederick, was gruesome.
It is hard to imagine the cruelty exhibited by the administrators and the other students; and, of course, we questioned the motivations of Frederick’s parents for basically forcing him to stay in that horrible environment: Were they trying to toughen him up, or were they more concerned about their own reputations in the Nazi heirarchy?
This is definitely an anti-war book. The looting of art works by the Nazis was reminiscent of the non-fiction book The Monuments Men which we read in February 2014. Of course, Doerr’s book is a novel, very well written, and a “better read” for most of us.
— Bob