1. I finished reading Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See this evening. I know from comments I listened to Doerr make in an interview and from some reading I've done, that at one level the title refers to the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that human eyes cannot detect. Relative to this book, radio waves are the most relevant light we cannot see since radios and radio transmissions are central to the story.
From that more literal meaning of light we cannot see, the title works figuratively. The novel left me thinking a lot about the light we cannot see in the innermost souls of the novel's primary characters. Against their will, these characters live in the perilous world of World War II. We cannot see the light deep within them from which courage and tenderness emanates, courage and tenderness that often contrasts with the brutality, greed, cruelty, and depravity of others in their lives and of the war effort itself.
I'll just rattle off a few unexplained examples: tenderness is at the heart of Daniel LaBlanc's relationship with his daughter, Marie-Laure, and, in turn, deep tenderness animates Marie-Laure's love for her great-uncle, Etienne and vice versa. The boy in the novel, Werner, even as he is being indoctrinated into fascism and Nazism persists in his tender feeling for his sister, Jutta, and for his closest friend at the paramilitary academy, Frederick. His bodyguard and protector, Frank Volkheimer, is capable of cold-bloodedness and, at the same time, within him is a light we cannot see that moves him to tenderness and deep caring for Werner, a devotion that continues long after the war ends.
2. I won't pretend to write about the countless metaphors pointing us toward this novel's exploration of the complexities of humanness and the human condition.
One metaphor that I experienced as prominent is embodied in the miniature models Daniel LaBlanc builds of the neighborhoods he and Marie-Laure live in, first in Paris and then in Saint-Malo.
Marie-Laure is blind. Her father builds these models so that Marie-Laure can navigate her world before she goes out into it by learning the details of its topography by running a finger over the scale model her father constructed. (His efforts take us back to what I said about tenderness and how his efforts to help his daughter emerge from a light within him we cannot see.)
As I thought more about miniature things in this story, it struck me that in the same way that Daniel LaBlanc's miniature models are microcosms of Paris and Saint-Malo, so the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner are microcosms of their countries at war. Through Marie-Laure's story, we navigate the horrors of displacement, the betrayals of collaborators, the courage of resistance, the persistence of hope and belief in the miniature form of what she experiences. Likewise, we navigate the harshness of the paramilitary academy Werner enrolls in, itself a microcosm of Nazism, and not only the depravities of the war effort, but the moral dilemmas soldiers like Werner face, not on a grand scale, but through the particular and specific experiences of Werner.
3. Last Thursday, I purchased and froze a bunch of bagels from Beach Bum Bakery. I have ground beef thawed that I'd like to make good use of and I started this evening by frying a patty, topping it with a slice of sharp cheddar cheese, and making a plain bagel burger with dill relish, ketchup, and plain yellow mustard.
It worked!
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