Summary
Summary Contextual Information on Anthony Doerr
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Contextual Information on Anthony Doerr and All the Light We Cannot See from a series of referenced news articles
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Doerr Methods, Practices and Reasoningo https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/22/anthony-doerr-pulitzer-interview
“Doerr is the kind of writer who when asked about his influences readily cites Anne Carson and Cormac
McCarthy.”
“But he’s never sure if the sort of reader this new book has attracted will enjoy Sebald as much as he does.”
“It is not sprawling or maximalist; its pleasures come from how carefully and artfully Doerr commands plot
and language. Doerr’s sentences are short and spare; the chapters brief too. This gives the impression of
simplicity, and indeed the book was sometimes criticized for it. “
“In a review in the New York Times, for example, the novelist William T Vollmann called the book “more than
a thriller and less than great literature”. Vollmann found the book full of “flimsy types”, particularly when it
came to the Nazis.”
“lyrical prose and tight plots…have a habit of hiding the work they took to produce. It took Doerr 10 years to
write All the Light We Cannot See, and in between, he told me, he “procrastinated” by writing two other
books”
“The problem that kept leading him away from the book, he said, was the research.”
“research which allowed him to include details about the radios used in Nazi Germany: “Even the poorest pit
houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volksempfänger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an
eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies.” And it is the accretion
of such details that makes the novel seem so intricate, beautiful and, on some level, magical.”
“I ask Doerr if he knows what drew people to All the Light We Cannot See in particular…the weight of the
themes that the second world war raises, which he admits does draw a lot of interest. Another has more to do
with his use of fable…“It’s a way of letting readers into the story,”
o https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-anthony-doerr-came-to_b_6926412?
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CmE0BZCqoj44tZ5yolHNrWqILiC7DxuPU6MWTgood
o I first saw Saint-Malo while I was on book tour in France. It’s a ghostly, imperious walled city in Brittany,
surrounded by emerald green sea on all four sides. It was night, and after dinner I went for a stroll on top of
the ramparts, peering into the third-floor windows of houses, the low-tide beaches glimmering in moonlight,
the town glowing.
o You walk its cobbled lanes, you smell the tides, you hear the echoes of your footsteps, and you think: this city
has survived for well over a thousand years. But Saint-Malo was almost entirely destroyed by American
artillery in 1944, in the final months of World War II, and was painstakingly put back together, block by granite
block, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That a place could so thoroughly hide its own incineration, and that
my own country was responsible for that incineration, fascinated me.
o That visit was an early step in a decade-long journey toward assembling the novel that is All the Light We
Cannot See. Along the way it became a book about radio: How did the Reich use radio to hammer a warped
nationalism into the minds of Germany’s poor? And how did brave souls use radio to resist German
occupation, not just in Vichy France but throughout Europe? I also wanted to conjure a time when it was a
miracle to hear the voice of a distant stranger in our homes, in our ears.
o I longed to tell a war story that felt new, and to do that I needed the reader to invest as completely in Werner
(the German orphan boy) as she does in Marie-Laure (the blind French heroine). In the war stories I read
growing up, French resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who constructed machine guns from paper
clips. And German soldiers were evil blond torturers, marching in coal scuttle helmets alongside barbed wire. I
wondered if things might have been more nuanced than that. Could I tell a story about how a promising boy
got sucked into the Hitler Youth and made bad decisions that led to terrible, unforgivable consequences, yet
still render him an empathetic character? And could I braid his story with the narrative of a disabled girl who in
so many ways was more capable than the adults around her? My attempt in this novel is to suggest the
humanity of both Werner and Marie-Laure, to propose more complicated portraits of heroes and villains; to
hint at, as World War II fades from the memories of its last survivors and becomes history, all the light we
cannot see.
o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYPrbT3IQc
o “I was dazzled that a city can be recreated so painstakingly that a foolish tourist like me couldn’t even tell”
o Title came before story
o Innocence and wisdom of the young who are untampered by society- “Is it right to do something because
everyone else is doing it” -Jutta
o “I could never write anything that could begin to approach the narrative of survivors”
o Gain sympathy for a Nazi- Hans Georg Henke photo
o “I rely too much on visual medium” hence why Doerr uses blind characters in his work as a challenge
o “Fredrick comes out of myself and my sons…he is the boys in our high schools now”
o “He’s (Frederick) is a dreamer…ultimately he makes the decision…it’s right to make your own decisions.”
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