Another
book review, yaaaaayyy!
Now
this is my new baby that has just been added to my preshus collection of babies
(re: books! Don’t panic, I don’t collect literal babies) very recently. And
this baby is quite fat, it weighed 530 pages to be exact but that’s not really
a problem for me though because I’m a fast reader, kinda.
So,
first the thing that captured my attention was the little badge on the cover
that says: “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2015”. And I thought, wow
this must be some awesome sh---udgecake. And for that, I was sold.
Long
story short, this book is about a blind girl and an orphan and a
magical-slash-cursed diamond called Sea of Flames. It was set during the world
war 2 in the city of Paris, Saint Malo, and Zollverein, Essen. The blind girl,
whose name was Marie-Laure, has a father who worked at the National Museum of
Paris as a locksmith. During the attack of Nazi, Marie-Laure and her father ran
away from Paris to her great-uncle house in Saint Malo. Without the knowledge
of Marie, her father has smuggled (or rather, been told to smuggle) the
extremely rare yet beautiful but cursed diamond called the Sea of Flames. It is
said that whoever carry the Sea of Flames with them will live forever, but the
people around them will stumble upon a very very bad luck. (Marie Laure did
stumble upon a strings of bad lucks because in the story she’s the one who
practically carried the diamond, though)
On
the other hand, the orphan whose name was Werner Pfennig is a genius with
radio. Live in a place called Zollverein , he was destined to work as a coal
miner for the rest of his life. That is until he and his sister, Jutta, found a
broken radio that fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice
of Hitler Youth.
The
rest is how the two found each other in the most peculiar, twisted, beautiful,
surprising way. You’ve got to read them yourself, seriously!
Doerr
is awesome (with capital A) at storytelling. He was very, very, very, very
descriptive, detailed and… I don’t know, visual? The way he describes the city
of Saint Malo, the miniature that Marie-Laure’s father build for her, how the
siege happen on Saint Malo, how he describes the Sea of Flames seems very
visual to me. I can almost smell the scent of sea every time Marie Laure goes
to the beach near her
great-uncle’s—Etienne, the name’s Etienne—mansion. The furnished model of the
city of Paris and Saint Malo, and the beautiful yet cursed Sea of Flames. Every word sways me and has successfully
brought me out of my quiet bedroom to the world of Marie Laure and Werner
Pfennig.
The
plot is also awesome. It was rather confuseing at first because, Doerr wrote it
back and forth from Marie Laure’s perspective, to Werner’s perspective, from the year of 1944, then goes back to
1934, then leaped to the year of 1954, and going back again to 1944, and so on
until in the end it finally reached the year of 2014. He was basically trying
to give us hints about how will Marie Laure and Werner meet through those
leaping of time settings. And when they finally met, you will not be spoiled
with a usual dramatic sappy meetings of a boy and girl in a romance novel. They
meet in an unusual circumstances, unusual time, unusual place (kinda), and
unusual situations. Even though the meeting was short (underlined the word
SHORT), but it was… memorable. At least for me. And Marie Laure. And Werner.
Doerr wrote it very swiftly and just the right amount of a supposed-to-be
romance.
The
ending… well, this is a big spoiler ahead. Werner died. Marie Laure got back to
Paris with Etienne, and grow old peacefully.
And the diamond, you ask? Well… it was back to where it belong. To the earth. Waiting for another (lucky? Unlucky?) person to find it again and meet their fate.
***
Title: All The Light We Cannot See
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Fourth Estate, London
Page Count: 530 pages
Score
Storyline: 4.5/5
Diction: 5/5
Cover: 4/5
Overall: 4.5/5
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