Anthony Doerr discusses enduring novel
“An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.”
That’s how the Pulitzer Prize Board summarized “All the Light We Cannot See” and its achievements when it was awarded the prize for fiction in 2015. And while that’s all true and good, no summary, however adulatory, can quite explain the massive and enduring appeal of Anthony Doerr’s WWII tale of a blind French girl named Marie-Laure and an orphaned Nazi boy named Werner crossing fates.
Though he put many years of hard work and research into the novel, not even Doerr can seem to believe its success. The literary blockbuster spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and is only now, nearly three years after its 2014publication, being released in paperback.
Doerr, 43, is gearing up to tour with the book, and will be stopping at the Mesa Arts Center Monday, April 3, for a discussion and signing. He spoke by phone about the book’s incredible success, the enduring appeal of a good WWII story and the miracle of art. Question: I’m not surprised you’re traveling with this book nearly three years after it was published, but I’m wondering if you are?
Answer: Of course I’m surprised! If you had told me any of this stuff would have happened when I finished the book, I would have fainted. My goals aren’t really commercial success. I was writing a book that took me forever and most of the main characters don’t meet until page 500 almost… Plus I’m asking the reader to empathize deeply with this German kid who’s swept up in the worst violence ever perpetrated by human beings. I didn’t think that sounded very commercial. Q: It’s a neat trick as a storyteller to get an audience to sympathize with a Nazi, even when it’s a kid. Was that difficult for you?
A: (My generation) was certainly encouraged not to empathize with the German side of the war. I have 13-yearold boys, and we don’t let them play too many video games, but when we let them go to their friends’ house, these WWII video games… the whole point is to control the Allies as they mow down all the Germans. You’re not asked to do a lot of empathetic work.
But it comes naturally in that that’s what I do for a living. I get to sit down and try to dream myself into other people’s heads. But it was very anxiety producing, trying to say what would it have been like and what would I have done in these circumstances… I think I would have been more like Werner, who was trying to keep his head down and focus on these little engineering problems and maybe be less politically aware. Even as a child, there are times when it is at our great peril to be politically ignorant. Q: I’ve read a study that said readers of literary fiction are more empathetic than non-readers.
A: Absolutely, and by the act of reading, they’re reinforcing that circuitry and building it out. Even a simpler word than empathy is imagination... Can you imagine your neighbor’s life as well as the kid who can’t find enough to eat in Aleppo right now? You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull. Q: The well never seems to run dry for WWII stories. Why do you think that is?
A: When I was writing the book a friend told me that if you took all the books written about WWII, ripped out the pages and dropped them on Germany it would cover the entire country. Why would I ever presume to try to add another book to that pile? I had some anxiety about trying to tell a WWII story that was different or new in some way… I think at a time of abundance, when I can walk literally three blocks from here and buy an avocado or 6,000 rolls of toilet paper, stories of scarcity are really appealing because they remind us of the blessings that we have. Whether it’s a scarcity of food and materials or a scarcity of freedom – just the freedom for you and I to talk to each other 900 miles apart or to go listen to whatever music we want or go see whatever films we would like to see – it’s such a good reminder to read narratives from times when those freedoms were restricted.
And then I think there are clearer lines in stories from WWII… You get a protagonist to a point where he or she has to make a moral choice. We’re rarely confronted with them in such clarity in our daily lives now. I think about the plastic water bottle right here on my desk. Will that plastic water bottle be around when I’m dead? Probably. It might be in a landfill when my grandkids are dead. Those actually are moral acts. I’m going to fly on airplanes a bunch in a few weeks. I don’t think that’s maybe the right thing to do, but I’m going to do it because my publisher wants me to do it, and because it’s fun to go meet people in different places and support independent book stores. But at the same time maybe the carbon penalty that my little airplane tickets will cause is something our great-grandkids will judge us more severely over.
Anyway, all those little moments in our lives, we make judgments that we don’t think about very much. I think it’s interesting to read stories where the consequences are much clearer, and WWII offers a lot. There’s so much darkness that you really highlight the little flames of good and hope around them.