"I'm not interested in cynical work. I think there are some incredible satirists, from Twain to George Saunders, who don't pollute the soul of their work when they write. For me, I'm just maybe a more reverent kind of artist. I can't find soulfulness when I'm being cynical, so I try, at least in my work, to be reverent and come from a place of awe." -Anthony Doerr in an April 2014 interview with Jill Owens on PowellsBooks.Blog.
Anthony Doerr, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner in the category of Fiction is experiencing a different kind of awe today as his name joins the esteemed ranks of other Pulitzer Prize winners such as Jennifer Egan, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Annie Proulx and Ernest Heminingway.
The word evocative, and all its accompanying synonyms: vivid, graphic, haunting, poignant, these are the descriptors that come to mind when reading this story set in Europe at the start of WWII. We follow Marie-Laure, a sixteen-year-old blind girl living with her father in Paris, and Werner Pfenning, an eighteen-year-old German orphan from Zollverein, who is conscripted into the Nazi army because of his engineering and mechanical abilities. The war sends them both far from home and separates them from their loved ones, but in the chaos of the final days of the war, their paths cross in Saint Malo through the mysterious miracle of radio waves. Written in gorgeous, spare prose and short, image-rich chapters, Doerr succeeds in drawing the reader into intensely vivid moments on every page. Let's take a moment and delve in:
Saint Malo, France. Photo: Antoine DECLERCK.CC BY SA 3.0
"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 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."
"Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things to right."
Vivid. Haunting. No surprise All the Light We Cannot See got the nod from the Pulitzer panel of judges: writer and critic Alan Cheuse, journalist Elizabeth Taylor and English professor David Haynes.
A Short History of the Pulitzer Prize
Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) designed the gold medallion in 1917.
The Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917 through a provision in the will of the powerful and visionary newspaper publisher and Hungarian immigrant, Joseph Pulitzer. Presented by the president of Columbia University upon the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize board, prizes are awarded in twenty-one categories, including literature, journalism, poetry, photography, drama and music. Juries of judges for each category make three nominations, and the Pulitzer Prize board chooses a winner by majority vote. Each winner receives $10,000.