All The Light We Cannot See Is A Study In Metaphorical Writing

It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015, but it's more than just excellent storytelling. It's a study in masterful writing.

All The Light We Cannot See was Anthony Doerr’s debut novel. It went bestseller, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2015.

It’s the story of a blind French girl and a German boy whose lives collide in occupied France during World War II. But this isn’t a book review. Instead, I want to look at the writing. Because it’s spectacular. Metaphorical. Poetic. This book is a writer using words the way an artist uses paint.

Stephen King Likes to say if you don’t read, you don’t have the tools to write. But it’s not just reading. I think you need to do more than read. Plenty of people read books and still put words together the same way they did in school reports. I think there’s merit to looking at how exceptional writers string words together.

Like this…

“He thinks of the old broken miners he'd see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”

Time as a barrel, slowly draining. Beautiful, metaphorical writing. It’s why many of the reviews mentioned not just the storyline, but the writing itself.

“Stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Those last nights in Paris, walking home with her father at midnight, the huge book clasped against her chest, Marie-Laure thinks she can sense a shiver beneath the air, in the pauses between the chirring of the insects, like the spider cracks of ice when too much weight is set upon it. As if all this time the city has been no more than a scale model built by her father and the shadow of a great hand has fallen over it.”

Not just cracked ice, but spider cracks of ice. Not just a shiver in the air, a shiver in the pauses between the chirring of the insects. Little book insight for you, she mentions a scale model built by her father. Because he did. In the story, her father built an entire scale model of the city so she could learn it by feel. To keep her safe, because she’s blind. Once you know she has a scale model of the city at home, the image of the shadow of a great hand falling over the city creates a beautiful visualization.

“A deeply moving novel from a writer whose sentences never fail to thrill” —Los Angeles Times

“Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night.”

Notice how he pairs literal with metaphorical. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. If he had used metaphor alone, it would not have been as powerful.

He doesn’t say he can’t stop thinking of her. Instead, he says she takes up residence inside him. He doesn’t say where. Doesn’t say in his mind or his heart. Inside him.

“Hauntingly beautiful” —The New York Times

“Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown.

Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light.

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.

Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.”

The little girl in the story went blind at age six. Too many writers would automatically paint a picture of a child whose world went dark. Grey, or nothing at all. But that’s not how the human mind works. When the mind cannot see, it imagines. Doerr knows this and lets us see through her eyes. Her father glows sapphire when he sits at his work bench. Bees are silver. Orange when he talks to Mademoiselle Fleury.

“Stunning. Uplifting. Not to be missed.” —Entertainment Weekly

All The Light We Cannot See is the kind of book you can read with a highlighter. And maybe, should. The story is compelling and well told. But even more so, it’s a study in metaphorical and poetic writing. Have you read it?

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