A Brilliant Author

        I finished this novel yesterday morning. It was a supreme sacrifice. I had a choice. Either I worked on started working on my report cards for an hour before heading to an all-day meeting, or I could finish Doerr's book. Choosing the book made sense, since I knew I would have trouble concentrating on anything else if I was still wondering how the book ended.

       This is a gem of a book. Anthony Doerr writes like a poet. There are jewel-like lines on every page.  Every single page. I'm not kidding. Here are just a few:

*     He practices concentrating only on blinking. Pulse in his neck. Tock tock tock tock. Others, he thinks, would do this with less finesse. Others would use scanners, explosives, pistol barrels, muscle. Von Rumpel uses the cheapest of materials, only minutes, only hours.
      Five bells. The light leaches out of the gardens.

*    "How about peaches, dear?" murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight.

*    A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he's looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey into the dark.

        This is a story of war. Of resistance. Of succumbing. Of refusing to succumb. Werner is a young German orphan who becomes one of the Nazi's assets. Marie-Laure is a young French blind girl. As you read the story, you know they are going to meet... but you have no idea what the outcome will be.

       Doerr (wisely) has written his novel in short chapters. Most of them are 2-4 pages long, and they alternate between Werner and Marie-Laure. The short spurts ensure that the reader doesn't get burnt out by the intensity of either character's events. We are sitting on the edge our seat with Marie-Laure, biting our nails, and then get a break from her as we read about Werner. The intensity of what is going on with his character builds up... and then we're back to Marie-Laure.  

        I would highlyhighlyhighly recommend this book. You get a window into what happened with the Nazi schools for young boys. You're privy to some of the things the French did as they resisted the Nazis. You're able to travel to a different country and a far different era...

When Poetry and Prose Intersect

       I am currently reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I'm a little more than a hundred pages into it. As its central characters, the novel has a blind girl living in France and an orphan boy living in Germany. The boy is being groomed by the Nazis because of his genius when it comes to radios and anything else his mind grasps. Somehow the two are going to connect... I'm not sure how.


       It's slow reading because I'm savoring the lines. Doerr writes prose like a poet. The images, the lines--they're so well crafted, and if the reader rushes, some gems will be overlooked.


       Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine is like that as well. I could just imagine Bradbury--like a diamond cutter--turning each phrase this way and that way, chipping away bits until the brilliance of his words was allowed to shine. Don't we all want that as writers and what we all hope for as readers? Don't we all love when the words just drip off the page and flash their brilliance?


      What is a fine line or phrase you've encountered (or crafted) recently? A writerly mind wants to know...