Catching the ‘light’
Pulitzer-winning novelist Anthony Doerr tapped into greater humanity for World War II tale
A NTHONY Doerr had no idea he was writing a blockbuster when he began the novel “All the Light We Cannot See.” In fact, he had serious doubts that anyone would want to read it.
After all, he was inviting readers to entertain sympathetic feelings about Nazis.
“I was nervous and anxious to ask readers to do that,” the author says.
Doerr needn’t have worried. The novel, published in 2014, had an 82-week run on The New York Times best-seller list and recently shot back up to the top 10, presumably on the strength of December holiday sales.
Set in France and Germany during World War II, “All the Light We Cannot See” also won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was named one of the Times’ 10 best books of 2014. Not bad for Nazis. “A mass murderer who is also quite sweet,” is the way Doerr describes one of the characters.
Still, on Monday evening’s sold-out event at the Wortham Theater Center, where Doerr will appear as part of Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, the author will read from one of his award-winning short stories instead. He’s not too keen on reading from the middle of the book.
On the day Doerr began
“Fundamentalism is about making assumptions about a group of people. Literature is an antidote to that.”
writing “All the Light We Cannot See” in 2004, he was riding on a train from Princeton, N.J., to Manhattan.
A man in front of him was yakking on his cellphone. The train dipped underground, and the man’s call dropped.
“He became absurdly angry, and he was swearing,” the author says. “What we’re all forgetting is that using these devices is a miracle.”
That sort of miracle figures prominently in the novel in the form of radio. The title refers to radio waves — electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than infrared light.
“It was invisible light from a thousand miles away,” Doerr explains. “For so many generations we could not do that.”
In the delicate but sturdy novel, short chapters alternate between two perspectives. One belongs to MarieLaure, a blind girl who flees Paris with her father, a master locksmith at the natural history museum. They go to live with a reclusive great-uncle in a tall house in Saint-Malo, a walled seaside town in Normandy.
The other is Werner, a white-haired German orphan from a coal town whose natural talent for fixing radios garners him an appointment to an exclusive German army training school.
Doerr, 42, knew a few things when he set out to write the novel, which took
Anthony Doerr, author
10 years to complete: It would include a blind girl, a boy who was trapped somehow, and the boy would listen to the girl on the radio.
Doerr also has published a memoir, two story collections — “The Shell Collector” (2002) and “Memory Wall” (2010) — and the 2004 novel “About Grace.”
Most of his work is set in the present, but for “All the Light We Cannot See,” he had to invest in research and, of course, trips to France. That one was tricky, he says, having to explain to his wife back in Idaho that she should stay home with their two young boys while he went off to France to work on a novel.
The careful clockwork of the book’s structure mimics elements of the plot, such as the tiny wooden scale model of Saint-Malo that MarieLaure’s father builds for her to memorize so that she can move about the city on her own.
Doerr says he consciously played with classic fairy-tale notions as well, but turned them on their heads. There’s a magic stone — but is it magic after all? The covetous Nazi is a kind of ogre. Marie-Laure is the princess in the castle — but is
she? And how princelike is Werner?
“The language of fairy tale and fable is blended into a hypertechnical realism, mashed together
with the history of electromagnetic radiation,” Doerr says.
Ultimately, he adds, it’s a humanist story, one that asks readers to care deeply for other humans about whom they might ordinarily make automatic judgments.
“Fundamentalism is about making assumptions about a group of people,” the author says. “Literature is an antidote to that. You invest so deeply in another human, who laughs and cries for the same reason you do.”
Doerr won’t say what he’s working on now. It might change, after all.
“I think it’s a novel,” he offers. “It’s a lot of words, and it involves Turkey.”