I just finished this book last night, and I still feel strongly moved by it.
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris. Her mother is dead. She loses her sight to illness. Her father, a locksmith at the Natural History Museum, dotes on her and trains her to use her other senses to compensate for loss of sight.
Marie-Laure grows up in the Natural History Museum, spending time with the curators and becoming an expert on shells among other things. She finds the world of the Museum, with its scholars and specimens, magical.
Her father makes puzzle boxes for her for her birthdays. She's very talented at opening them, and will find a treat inside. Then her father begins to give her Braille books. One of them is Jules Vernes' Twenty Leagues Under the Sea. Her father makes a model of her neighborhood, which helps her to learn how to navigate the streets,
Werner Pfennig is an orphan after his father dies in a mining accident, when he and his little sister, Jutta, go to live with Frau Elena in a house with other orphans. He's traumatized by his father's accident, and dreads and hates the mines. The mines are where all the boys go when they grow up - when they're fifteen or sixteen. He pulls his sister, Jutta, around in a little wagon amidst the slag and coal heaps.
Werner finds a radio somewhere, and manages to make it work. Late at night, he and Jutta sit up and listen to a science program for children that is broadcast from France. Jutta is particularly fascinated, and begins to exhaustively draw pictures of Paris. Werner begins fixing radios for the neighbors. Finally, a Nazi officer comes to the house looking for him; he wants Werner to fix his radio. Werner is nervous, but he does fix the radio, and this leads to his being nominated for entrance into a military school. As frightening as he finds the entrance exam, and as much as his sister profoundly mistrusts this turn of events, he feels compelled to accept any route that will permit him to escape the mines.
When the war comes, Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father to Brittany, where they live with her father's uncle, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. Meanwhile, Werner is miserable at his military school.
The book opens with the bombing of Saint-Malo, the medieval walled city on the coast of Brittany where Marie-Laure lives with her great-uncle and his servant, the redoubtable Madame Manec.
The narrative skips forward and backward in time, and the story is told through short chapters. I think the short chapters give a reader a sense of time passing quickly, and also allows the reader to focus not only on the plot but the wonderful pictures the author creates.
Werner's experiences in the war reminded me of the film of Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum. Marie-Laure's childhood in Paris reminded me of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by David Selznick.
I absolutely adored the first 100 pages with their jewel box quality: the fascinating exhibits at the museum, the wonderful puzzle boxes, the streets of Paris and the Jardin des Plantes. After the invasion, things become much less magical and much more frightening. I found that my sense of dread was profound, so much so that I found it hard to return to the book after page 100.
A friend who read this book said that the ending fizzled out. Perhaps it did, but I didn't see it that way. I thought that the brevity with which the end events were described were a reminder of the absurdity, brutality and randomness of violence in war. There was another example of this from earlier in the book that has stayed with me: Werner's friend forces men he meets on their travels to take off their boots and let him try them on. He's a big man and he's looking for boots that fit. When he finds boots that fit him, he just takes them, even though he knows a man without boots will die from exposure. The war was over for the man forced to give up his boots.
This man, who behaved in a way that certainly preserved himself, really loved Werner, I think, and certainly tried to protect him. He also showed great tenderness to Werner's nephew in the monologue.
I think the epilogue permits us to see that Werner is not forgotten, and that the intensity with which he is missed is a reflection of his exceptional quality. I think it's meant to be both a comfort and a balancing of the brutality and anonymity of war.
I think I read something about Anthony Doerr, or an interview with him, in which he said that he wanted to show that people are good. I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but perhaps he meant that people have the capacity for goodness even though they steal other people's boots. It's a romantic notion, and a comforting one.
The European Union is requiring Google to disclose the fact that accessing its products, including this blog, leaves cookies on your computer. Here's an article that provides more information: http://www.editweaks.com/2015/07/googles-new-european-union-cookie.html. And here's another: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2953692/google-tells-its-publisher-partners-to-comply-with-eu-cookie-directive.html
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris. Her mother is dead. She loses her sight to illness. Her father, a locksmith at the Natural History Museum, dotes on her and trains her to use her other senses to compensate for loss of sight.
Marie-Laure grows up in the Natural History Museum, spending time with the curators and becoming an expert on shells among other things. She finds the world of the Museum, with its scholars and specimens, magical.
Her father makes puzzle boxes for her for her birthdays. She's very talented at opening them, and will find a treat inside. Then her father begins to give her Braille books. One of them is Jules Vernes' Twenty Leagues Under the Sea. Her father makes a model of her neighborhood, which helps her to learn how to navigate the streets,
Werner Pfennig is an orphan after his father dies in a mining accident, when he and his little sister, Jutta, go to live with Frau Elena in a house with other orphans. He's traumatized by his father's accident, and dreads and hates the mines. The mines are where all the boys go when they grow up - when they're fifteen or sixteen. He pulls his sister, Jutta, around in a little wagon amidst the slag and coal heaps.
Werner finds a radio somewhere, and manages to make it work. Late at night, he and Jutta sit up and listen to a science program for children that is broadcast from France. Jutta is particularly fascinated, and begins to exhaustively draw pictures of Paris. Werner begins fixing radios for the neighbors. Finally, a Nazi officer comes to the house looking for him; he wants Werner to fix his radio. Werner is nervous, but he does fix the radio, and this leads to his being nominated for entrance into a military school. As frightening as he finds the entrance exam, and as much as his sister profoundly mistrusts this turn of events, he feels compelled to accept any route that will permit him to escape the mines.
When the war comes, Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father to Brittany, where they live with her father's uncle, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. Meanwhile, Werner is miserable at his military school.
The book opens with the bombing of Saint-Malo, the medieval walled city on the coast of Brittany where Marie-Laure lives with her great-uncle and his servant, the redoubtable Madame Manec.
The narrative skips forward and backward in time, and the story is told through short chapters. I think the short chapters give a reader a sense of time passing quickly, and also allows the reader to focus not only on the plot but the wonderful pictures the author creates.
Werner's experiences in the war reminded me of the film of Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum. Marie-Laure's childhood in Paris reminded me of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by David Selznick.
I absolutely adored the first 100 pages with their jewel box quality: the fascinating exhibits at the museum, the wonderful puzzle boxes, the streets of Paris and the Jardin des Plantes. After the invasion, things become much less magical and much more frightening. I found that my sense of dread was profound, so much so that I found it hard to return to the book after page 100.
A friend who read this book said that the ending fizzled out. Perhaps it did, but I didn't see it that way. I thought that the brevity with which the end events were described were a reminder of the absurdity, brutality and randomness of violence in war. There was another example of this from earlier in the book that has stayed with me: Werner's friend forces men he meets on their travels to take off their boots and let him try them on. He's a big man and he's looking for boots that fit. When he finds boots that fit him, he just takes them, even though he knows a man without boots will die from exposure. The war was over for the man forced to give up his boots.
This man, who behaved in a way that certainly preserved himself, really loved Werner, I think, and certainly tried to protect him. He also showed great tenderness to Werner's nephew in the monologue.
I think the epilogue permits us to see that Werner is not forgotten, and that the intensity with which he is missed is a reflection of his exceptional quality. I think it's meant to be both a comfort and a balancing of the brutality and anonymity of war.
I think I read something about Anthony Doerr, or an interview with him, in which he said that he wanted to show that people are good. I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but perhaps he meant that people have the capacity for goodness even though they steal other people's boots. It's a romantic notion, and a comforting one.
The European Union is requiring Google to disclose the fact that accessing its products, including this blog, leaves cookies on your computer. Here's an article that provides more information: http://www.editweaks.com/2015/07/googles-new-european-union-cookie.html. And here's another: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2953692/google-tells-its-publisher-partners-to-comply-with-eu-cookie-directive.html
