20 April 2016

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

Look, I'm just not the target audience for this. If you're writing a sentimental story about Nazis and Resistance fighters, I am immediately on my guard, and not very sympathetic to your project.

But I will absolutely grant that the prose is astonishingly effective: arresting images that linger, sometimes unpleasantly so (ie, it gave me nightmares). It is a very readable, skillfully plotted adventure story. It is a crowd-pleaser. A blind French girl who loves snails and Jules Verne? Absolutely.

It is also a rather simplistic and cliché take on the Second World War. This is very obviously a made up story that is set in WWII for added thrills, and not out of a genuine engagement with the realities of that time period. And -- this will probably make me seem totally insufferable, and is maybe really weird -- but, knowing French and German, I found myself frequently bothered by the fact that all of this was clearly created and imagined in English. These are sentences that simply wouldn't happen in those languages. Which contributed to my sense of falsity - it's not a story that is genuinely rooted in the lifeworlds of the characters.

I'm not entirely surprised that it won a Pulitzer, and oddly enough, it in no way diminished by interest in reading yesterday's winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer!

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