All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I also loved organizing the chapters in groups and seeing what kinds of patterns I could make.įinally, I think this structure is a way to give a reader breathing room. I found that by suspending one narrative for a few pages and returning to the other, it generated some old-fashioned narrative momentum because a reader was left in suspense, wanting to know what was happening to the character we’d left. But this was the first time I tried a strictly binary structure - A-B-A-B-A-B, Marie-Werner-Marie-Werner - on such a large scale, oscillating back and forth between two protagonists in a kind of bilateral symmetry. I loved how constructing little pocket-chapters in All the Light offered me a chance to make small, manageable miniatures that I could refine over months, then string together into strands to tell a story. The little titled segments present a way for me to be obsessive-if I only have a few hours, I can read through one, revise and try to improve it. I started playing around with brief, titled sections in a short story about the Three Gorges Dam called “Village 113.” “Memory Wall” was the next progression: a novella told in short sections, each with a title, and this time the narrator roved between characters, as it does in All the Light. Can you talk about how/why you structured the book this way?Ī: I’ve been building up to this structure for a while, trying it out in various shorter forms. It’s quite different from anything you’ve written before, and the structure is really captivating.

Q: One of the things I noticed right away about the book is its distinctive style.

Ultimately, the title is intended as a suggestion that we spend too much time focused on only a small slice of the spectrum of possibility. It’s also a metaphorical suggestion that there are countless invisible stories still buried within the Second World War - that stories of ordinary children, for example, are a kind of light we do not typically see. Q: What’s All the Light We Cannot See about?Ī: The power of radio technology in the first half of the 20th century and its use as both an instrument of disinformation and liberation a cursed diamond children in Nazi Germany puzzles snails the Natural History Museum in Paris courage fear bombs keys and locks the magical seaside town of Saint-Malo in France and the ways in which people, against all odds, try to be kind to one another.Ī: It’s a reference first and foremost to all the light we literally cannot see: that is, the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the ability of human eyes to detect (radio waves, of course, being the most relevant).

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr