All the Light We Cannot See
I can't decide whether or not I like this book.
It is true that it was beautifully written and amazingly constructed. It bounces between two lives, running nearly parallel to each other before and during World War II. Those lives affect each other in myriad unexpected ways, though they only intersect once, for a few brief hours.
Marie-Laure, a blind, French girl, is intelligent and resilient, lending her talents to the resistence after her father is arrested. Werner Pfennig is a Nazi, so enthralled with math and radios that he is willing to do just about anything to pursue them further, including follow orders that he knows he probably shouldn't.
Part of my problem with this book is that it asks me to sympathize with Pfennig. And there are times when he is sympathetic. But he's also a coward. His resistance comes too late and is arguably too little. He saves one girl, but it's mostly because he failed to save another one.
And this all would have been okay, and I probably would have considered this a good and challenging book. But then the author included a rape scene at the very end. It adds nothing. It's completely gratuitous. It's like he felt that a war book has to have a rape to be an authentic war book, so he slapped one on at the end. I don't know if there's a word that means both offensive and boring, but that's what this scene was.
So I ended the book with a bad taste in my mouth, and it tainted everything that came before it. This is probably a very good book. It won the Pulitzer. But I'm deeply ambivalent.
It is true that it was beautifully written and amazingly constructed. It bounces between two lives, running nearly parallel to each other before and during World War II. Those lives affect each other in myriad unexpected ways, though they only intersect once, for a few brief hours.
Marie-Laure, a blind, French girl, is intelligent and resilient, lending her talents to the resistence after her father is arrested. Werner Pfennig is a Nazi, so enthralled with math and radios that he is willing to do just about anything to pursue them further, including follow orders that he knows he probably shouldn't.
Part of my problem with this book is that it asks me to sympathize with Pfennig. And there are times when he is sympathetic. But he's also a coward. His resistance comes too late and is arguably too little. He saves one girl, but it's mostly because he failed to save another one.
And this all would have been okay, and I probably would have considered this a good and challenging book. But then the author included a rape scene at the very end. It adds nothing. It's completely gratuitous. It's like he felt that a war book has to have a rape to be an authentic war book, so he slapped one on at the end. I don't know if there's a word that means both offensive and boring, but that's what this scene was.
So I ended the book with a bad taste in my mouth, and it tainted everything that came before it. This is probably a very good book. It won the Pulitzer. But I'm deeply ambivalent.
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