[BOOK REVIEW] All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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

[Book Review] Mystery of Yellow Room (Translated version) by Gaston Leroux

Now, first I wanna say sorry to this book because I’ve just recently finished reading it despite already bought it since last year. There’s several reasons to that, though, and one of them are included on the reasons (reason-ception) on why I should make a review about this book.

Okay, so as I said before I bought this book on the late of 2014 when I went on a driven-by-boredom-and-broken-heart weekend shopping. I was curious since the cover is so bright it almost outshined the neon lamp of the book store, and since it was sitting on the front row of the New Release rack so I just had the urge to give this little book my attention. First glance of the cover I thought it looked cool, with a classic and minimalist design of old France (I don’t know the name, mind you) decoration and an illustration of a small window. And of course don’t forget the yellow color that suits perfectly with the title. Overall, the exterior of the book seems nice at the moment.

That leads me to the next step, which is reading the synopsis. To my surprise, it was even better. To sum up the story, it was about a young journalist named Roulletible who was shockingly uncover the murder attempt case of Mademoiselle Stagerson in the Yellow Room—a very isolated place where no one could come in or out without being noticed. These were the words that got me hooked: “…Bagaimana kejahatan dapat terjadi di tempat yang tidak bisa dimasuki oleh orang lain? Bagaimana pelaku bisa keluar dari ruang tertutup? Apa motif dibalik tindakan pelaku? Siapa pelakunya? Bagaimana pula Roulletible membogkar kasus tersebut dengan begitu mencengangkan?” Sounds promising, right? And with that, I ended up buying the book.

But what disappoint me is that when I read the first line of the first chapter… oh boy, it was really REALLY poorly translated. It was so far from my expectation of a cleanly written (translated) book of detective tales. The words are overlapping with each other and so it makes the sentence much longer than it could have been. And of course that also result in an ineffective series of sentence that makes even one paragraph is so burdensome to read. It was like the translator just simply translated the original book paragraph by paragraph through google translate and pasted it just as it is. It reminds me of one of my college assignments in which we had to make a resume of a book written in a really advanced English (you know that kind of English where the author seem to use so much of thesaurus, yeah that kind), and we just, like, put sentence by sentence to google translate and pasted the translated version to our assignments. And because of that, during the first-read of this book I can only finish the first 3 chapters as it was so uncomfortable to read.

And so, the year goes on and I eventually forget about this book which was sitting on the back of my bookshelf. Only recently I finally gathered the motivation to finish what I’ve started… and I read it all over again. Turns out, the storyline is not that bad, as expected. It was full of thrill and suspense here and there, especially on a few last chapters when Roulletible has ‘seen’ the murder. Even though, I have to read some part for, like, 2 or 3 times before I get what it meant—because of the rough and hard-to-understand translation of course—but when I got to the ending… that was the moment when I could finally say: “Damn, why didn’t I finish this book earlier”. But really, for me the ending is the greatest thing in this book. It was surprising, genius, and entertainingly twisted. I like how Leroux had idea of making that one essential character as the culprit (I won’t give any spoiler, you have to guess. Tee-hee~).

Overall, I think this book is nice if I had just read it in its original version. I mean, the English version since the original version is written in French and I don’t understand any single French. But for this to be translated to Bahasa? I would only give 2 out of 5 stars.

***

Title: Mystery of Yellow Room
Writer: Gaston Leroux
Publisher: Visi Media
Page Count: 320 pages

Score
Storyline: 4/5
Diction: 2/5
Cover: 3/5
Overall: 3.5/5