Anthony Doerr

This is a novel spanning centuries by the author of 2014's book of the moment, The Light We Cannot See. There are several interwoven stories, ranging from the mid-fifteen century siege of Constantinople, to a girl on a spaceship traveling to what is hoped to be a hospitable planet. All share a knowledge of an Ancient Greek story about a simple shepherd searching for the [Cloud Cuckoo Land] in the clouds, an avian version of Big Rock Candy Mountain. As the stories alternate, connections show more between them are revealed.

This is an unabashedly sentimental book, but somehow I loved it. Doerr has a knack of creating characters for whom the reader immediately cares about, even when that character is doing bad things. He also manages to write a novel involving several different times and characters and make each equally interesting, from a young man caring for a pair of oxen, drafted into working for the sultan besieging the city of Constantinople, to an elderly man helping a group of children put on a play, to life on a spaceship where everyone aboard knows they won't be the ones to reach the planet they hope will save them. Doerr knows what he's doing and does a masterful job with an intricate and interwoven collection of plots and his writing is a joy to read. It is a novel designed with the intention of making the reader feel, but somehow I didn't feel manipulated, even as I so clearly was. show less

Reading this book felt like doing a puzzle with beautiful, imaginatively drawn pieces. You don't know what the final picture will be, but you know it's got to be something fantastic. The book requires some close attention to recognize all the puzzle pieces, but your patience and attention are well worth it, as it all comes together to form an intricate and unexpected picture.

Made up of three stories from different time periods that intertwine and spiral together, each story contains elements show more of homecoming, identity, and searching. Anna and Omeir are on opposite sides of the siege of Constantinople in 1453. Seymore and Xeno are on opposite sides of an accidental hostage situation at a library in Idaho in 2020. Konstance is the only survivor on a generation ship in 2145 (or so she thinks). Wrapping around and running through each separate story is the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fictional ancient Greek comedy that is found and lost and found again throughout history.

Anna finds a codex in a ruin on which is written the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, in which Diogenes tells the tale of his attempt to find the mystical world of the birds. Anna keeps the codex safe, and it disappears until it is next discovered some 500 years later in a vault of the Vatican. It is very degraded, but Xeno attempts to translate it as the pages are scanned in and released to the public. He tells the story to a group of children, who decide to create a play based on the story. Konstance is told the story by her father, one of the few members of the generation ship crew who remember Earth, which has become an environmental disaster. When the rest of the crew is killed by a plague, she pieces the story together on scraps of fabric, and ultimately pieces together the reality of her world. It is primarily Xeno's and Konstance's stories that weave together, but no part of any of the stories could exist without the rest.

This is truly one of the most creative and intricate books I've ever read. Doerr puts all the pieces together very well. And not only does he keep the whole puzzle together in his head, he writes lines like:
(on learning Greek) "Boil the words you already know down to their bones, and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, starting back up."
(describing the frozen north) "...it was so cold that when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said." show less

I thought I had hit maximum capacity for books about WWII last year (even though most of them were excellent reads, like the Book Thief and the English Patient), but apparently I hadn't hit the limit yet since I was fully capable of enjoying this novel.

Much in the same vein as the Book Thief, our protagonists are young and come from rather unique backgrounds. Marie-Laure is the blind daughter of a museum's locksmith from Paris and Werner is an orphaned German boy with a talent for show more mathematics and mechanics, who must survive very different experiences of the war to be brought together by Marie-Laure's great grandfather's radio at the very finale of the war. Doerr's unlikely choice of both of these characters is one which I'm sure will not go unnoticed by readers of this genre, as he strikes a careful balance between the novelty of something new and a well-researched historical reality to carve out a unique space within the larger narrative of WWII.

What I enjoyed most (and was equally horrified by) was Doerr's choice to place Werner into the machinery of the Nazi state that trains young boys to be soldiers. The stark brutality of the training camps is even more extreme in its treatment of its wards than modern camps since it is intensely obvious that these children are being brainwashed to believe only in the power of the State and to carry out brutal acts (even against each other) in its service. Some are there at the will of their parents and others like Werner are there at the will of the State due to their physical or mental potential, with all forces (excepting for Werner) in agreement that this training is the best possible place for these children to be.

Marie-Laure's experience seems much more light-hearted in comparison -she is surrounded by family and takes on the risk of being a partisan of her own volition - but her survival becomes perilous when we become privy to the fact that the diamond that her father was responsible for safekeeping is now in her possession. Her foe is a former jeweller turned Nazi commander who's task it is to oversee the collection (read: theft) of Europe's cultural wealth in the form of paintings, statues, gold, and of course jewels. The supposedly cursed diamond is one which may or not be based on any real-life jem, but the Nazi commander certainly is since it was a major initiative of Hitler's to plunder Europe for all its cultural wealth for "safekeeping" under the hand of the Third Reich. show less

O que a guerra representa para quem não decidiu iniciar o conflito? Ou que não pôde escolher não fazer parte dela? Esse é o tema central deste livro do norte-americano Anthony Doerr, que cruza as histórias de dois pré-adolescentes que vivem em países que se tornar "inimigos"na Segunda Guerra Mundial.
O autor constrói a narrativa em avanços e retrocessos no tempo ao longo do conflito. Fala muito pouco de episódios militares, e foca mais em seus personagens: civis, crianças, show more adolescentes e idosos, de donos de padaria a professores e estudiosos. Mesmo os soldados de "Toda a luz que não podemos ver", independentemente dos objetivos e motivação política de seus líderes, são apenas vítimas.
É um texto muito emotivo. Mantenha a caixa de lenços de papel ao alcance das mãos. show less