Deodhar Ananya, S.Y.B.Tech. Instrumentation and Control Engineering,MKSSS’s Cummins College of Engineering for Women,Pune
All The Light We Cannot See is a Pulitzer winning novel set in World War II Europe. It follows a blind French girl, Marie-Laure and a German soldier, Werner, an orphaned miner’s son is trying to escape from his fate, even if it means becoming a Nazi soldier. He leaves behind the life he has always known. He meets people from all different walks of life at the military school. He sees war cripple people who are not built for it; a boy who loves birds, one who listens to Bach, and himself, who makes sense of the world through Hertz’s equations. Dreamers turn into bitter realists and desperate young men morph into killers. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the daughter of a locksmith. She and her father are forced to flee Paris during France’s Nazi occupation. She is a girl so resilient, she can walk around the neighborhood unassisted because she has learnt it by heart. She dreams of the sea by reading with her fingers, knows the species of crustaceans just by the spiral of their shells. Her father is arrested by German police. Marie-Laure responds by helping the resistance movement. She has not given up. She is an anomaly. Werner and Marie-Laure’s interaction is only a few pages. Yet during the brief exchange, she does not hate him and neither does he. They talk about their childhood, family, of how they would live their lives if there had been no war. Two people who are the reason for each other’s misery talk about siblings and Paris and peaches when they first meet. There are no nationalities, no ideologies in the way. In the end, all blood flows red and Doerr conveys this masterfully. Its brilliance is in its simplicity, that the content of the climax is so mundane. Maybe that’s what makes human, the common things no one thinks about, but which become the most important threads that bind together in situation like these. Such reading reminds that humans have common origins and will help to be a little more kind.
वाचन संकल्प महाराष्ट्राचा
पुस्तक परीक्षण पोर्टल, जयकर ज्ञानस्रोत केंद्र, सावित्रीबाई फुले पुणे विद्यापीठ, पुणे