My experience reading “ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE “by Anthony Doerr

All The Light We Cannot See is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by the acclaimed author Anthony Doerr. This is my first time reading literary fiction. When I posted a photo  of my TBR (To Be Read) pile on Bookstagram , a  few people commented that it is the best book they have read. Hence, I was looking forward to it . It was no doubt a beautifully written story that I truly appreciate but  I am not going to lie – It was exhausting. May be I am still not ready venturing into literary fiction. 😐

The story is about a blind French girl named Marie Laure and a German boy Werner Pfennig  whose paths eventually cross during the World War II. Marie lives with her father who has built a miniature Paris city model  so that her blind daughter could find her way home. But when the Nazis invade their city , they had to abandon their home and take refuge . In the meantime, in Germany an orphan named Werner who is skilful, intelligent and has a brilliant mind is forced to join the Hitler youth / army. The story follows their separate lives from 1934 to 2014 which eventually is destined to intertwine.

My thoughts while reading it-

I was getting confusing vibes as soon as  I saw the story being told by multiple perspectives  in multiple timelines.
The first day I read almost a quarter of the book and quite honestly found it intimidating.
On the second day  when I continued reading,  I started confusing the different story lines and I had to look back and sort of re read some parts to get an idea of what had happened before. I ended up reading very little that day.
The same thing happened the days after that and I was getting frustrated. So, I decided to spice things up a little and tried listening to it on audio book. I was reading and simultaneously listening to the story. I started enjoying it. Hence a revelation - try simultaneously reading and listening to the audio book when you don’t feel like reading.

 Unfortunately, that did not last long. Reading this book felt like a chore. Hence after two weeks of relentlessly trying (& pretending) to love this book, I decided it’s time to quit. 😐

I had only 20% left of this book but I was so impatient and annoyed that I looked at the rest of the summary on the internet. And whatever I learnt from the summary, it was not good enough to go ahead and finish the remaining portions of the book. So after many self persuasions, I decided that I should just quit. I personally read books for fun and entertainment, but if it feels exhausting then it is best to just leave it.

However I cannot deny the fact that there were a lot of things that I absolutely adored. And maybe that is the reason why I had such a hard time DNFing this one. So in this post, I am going to cite some of the pros and cons of this book. I will start with the cons so that we can end this blog on a positive note with its pros. 😊

What I didn’t like (cons) -

Multiple timelines /Flashbacks – We go back and forth between different timelines. Just to give you an idea of why this was an issue for  me - The first chapter covers what happened to the two main protagonists in the year 1945, the next chapter flashes back to the year 1942. The next one comes back to 1945 and in the following chapter we see the events occurring in the year 1943 and so on.   Each chapter consisted of at least 25 pages. So whenever I started a new chapter, I had to flip back to that year and recall what had happened.

Multiple stories- Apart from the two characters, we also followed the lives of other people who were no doubt significant to the storyline but it just added more confusion. To keep up with everybody’s life was exhausting.  There are to be precise three different stories which as predicted would kind of intertwine at the end. First is the story of Marie who is blind and her struggles to live in the world war setting. Second tells the story of a boy named Werner who ends up in the Hitler youth/army. There is another side story which has to do with a diamond/stone which is believed to be cursed.

Slow pace- The story was not moving for most parts. At least till the parts I have managed to finish, nothing significant happened.

The struggle of keeping up with the story- As I mentioned before the different timelines and the multiple stories was throwing me off. I had to constantly re read certain portions multiple times to actually figure out what’s happening. It was quite overwhelming.

What I liked-

The language was beautifully descriptive. The writing style was absolutely incredible. You could feel the emotions of every character . I was able to picturise every scenarios in the story. It is a good lesson for budding authors to learn how a sentence can draw a vivid picture.  I especially liked Marie‘s parts.  She was blind, so the use of imagery and colours and sensory languages made sense to the overall narrative. That kind of helped me to not just visualise but also feel the story.

It was an emotional read. One cannot help but shed a little tear while reading the emotional turmoil of the characters. Anything with a world war setting tears me up but this one truly made me empathise and also made me feel glad of my privileged life. We have everything yet we are never content.

It was pretty Educational in the sense that I learnt a lot about World War 2 .It was kind of a unique take on a past event. Basically the story of world war is  told in a human perspective which was far removed from what we know from  our history textbooks

It is filled with valuable life lessons - Morality, Bravery and Love.

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever”

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”

Overall, I am super conflicted about this book. It is certainly not for an  impatient soul like me.  Maybe one day, when my reading taste has evolved  and I am finally up for award winning novels that are usually relentlessly sad, slow and exhausting (that’s what I have heard 😛 ), I shall pick it up  and try finishing it.

AVAILABLE ONLINE - amazon