All the Light We Cannot See

Seven-year-old Werner Pfennig grows up in a coal-mining town called Zollverein, just outside Essen, in Germany. He and his sister, Jutta, are orphans; they are being raised in the Children’s House by Frau Elena, a Protestant nun from Alsace. Werner is small for his age, but very intelligent: Jutta is a talented artist. They both have snow-blond hair. Werner builds useful things out of junk that he and his sister collect from around town. Jutta and Werner are very close.

Marie-Laure loses her vision as a result of congenital cataracts. Neighbors discuss the LeBlancs behind their backs, saying that they must be cursed, because Marie-Laure’s mother died in childbirth and now Marie-Laure is blind. Marie-Laure despairs of making her way in the world, but her father patiently teaches her how to navigate her neighborhood.

He takes her to work with him every day in the museum, where he is a locksmith, responsible for handling the thousands of keys required for the exhibits and contents of the museum, including handing out all of the keys on a daily basis to each employee. Many of the contents of the museum are priceless.

Her father quizzes her by placing objects in her hands, including keys and items from the museum, forcing her to learn about the world through touch. He helps her learn Braille. In addition, the men and women who work in the museum share their knowledge with Marie-Laure; she learns all about the natural world from these experts. She particularly loves learning about mollusks, shells, and animals that live in the sea from Dr. Geffard.

Werner finds a broken radio receiver in a dump and takes it home. He repairs it, bringing a world of music and knowledge to his sister and his fellow orphans. Werner is eight years old. Jutta is two years younger than Werner.

Marie-Laure’s father makes wooden puzzle boxes each year for her birthday, hiding a treat inside as a reward for solving the puzzle. Daniel has also made a miniature version of their neighborhood, containing every building, bench, and street, to help her learn her way around. Daniel asks her to walk them home from the museum one day when she is seven; although the route is familiar to her, she cannot.

While other children play outdoors, Werner takes apart the radio and puts it together again. He scrounges materials and constructs a loudspeaker for the radio. Werner has a deep curiosity about the world and how things work. Each night, Frau Elena, the head of the orphanage, allows all the children to listen to the radio. They listen to music and educational shows; they listen as citizens are exhorted to great effort and hard work for their country.

By the autumn of 1936, Werner notices toy soldiers in the stores, wearing brown shirts and tiny red armbands marked with swastikas. Suddenly, the country seems more prosperous: Jutta gets a new pair of shoes, and Werner gets a new pair of pants. All 12 children in the orphanage listen to radio broadcasts sponsored by the government: many stories concern invaders who want to murder German children but are stopped by loyal citizens who inform on them to the police. The invaders are taken away; the children are saved, and everyone is happy.

Repeatedly, Marie-Laure fails to walk her father home. Suddenly, during the winter she is eight years old, the world begins to make sense. The model makes sense. She learns to navigate the real world; her father takes her to new places in the neighborhood, and she is able to walk them home. They celebrate: Daniel lifts her up and swings her around; they laugh as the snow falls between the branches of the old chestnut tree outside their apartment building.

In the spring when Werner is 10 years old, the two oldest boys in the orphanage—ages 13 and 14—join the Hitler Youth. The brag about the rifles they are going to learn to shoot and the tanks they will soon learn to drive. They criticize anything foreign, such as a French picture book. Frau Elena stops speaking French in front of these two boys; she worries about her accent. The two boys become thugs who get into fights and swagger around the town with other teenagers, yelling “Heil Hitler” at passersby. The boys tear up Jutta’s imaginary drawings of Paris.

Werner keeps himself small and inconspicuous: he reads the science magazines in the drug store and buys a notebook in which he draws plans for x-ray goggles and other inventions.

A man from the Labor Ministry visits Children’s House to tell the boys about the noble work they will all begin when they turn 15: working in the mines. Werner has claustrophobic nightmares because his father died in the mine and his body was never recovered.

Marie-Laure learns all the smells and sounds of her world, as she learns to mentally count the paces between one marker—such as a bench, hydrant, or doorway—and the next. Her world, she explains to the children who ask her questions, is also full of color and light: even music gives off a color. She wanders around the museum, and the experts working there talk to her, answer her questions, and then lead her back to her father in the key pound.

On her ninth birthday, her father gives her a Braille copy of Around the World in Eighty Days; she devours this book and reads it repeatedly.

Jutta finds a reel of copper wire, and the two children construct an antenna for the radio. At night, they sit in the attic and secretly listen to music and programs from all over Europe. They discover a Frenchman giving lectures on science and the natural world meant for children: how the brain creates light; the timeline of the earth that created coal from ancient plants and pressure inside the earth over millennia. Jutta and Werner are spellbound.

Rumors fly around the museum that they are going to display the Sea of Flames. Rumors about the curses associated with the stone also abound. Marie-Laure has read Around the World in Eighty Days so many times that the Braille is worn: this year her father buys her Dumas’ The Three Musketeers for her birthday. She lives in her imagination through these books. She is 10 years old.

Her father is called to a two-hour meeting with the director of the museum, and he immediately begins working deep inside the museum on a secret project. He won’t reveal anything about it to Marie-Laure, who speculates about what he is doing all day. As the employees attribute bad things that happen in the museum to the diamond, Marie-Laure’s father refuses to let her believe in curses: there is only good or bad luck; there is no such thing as a curse.

Werner and Jutta listen to every broadcast from the Frenchman that they can find, every night around bedtime. Jutta likes a program on magnetism best, while Werner prefers one about light. Both children use the ideas they learn about from the program to imagine another world, a world of possibility. Werner imagines himself as an engineer or a scientist someday.

Soon Marie-Laure’s father resumes their regular schedule and stops working in secret. On her 11th birthday, Marie-Laure receives the first part of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and a puzzle box, consisting of 13 steps that she solves in less than five minutes. The box contains two bonbons. Marie is swept away into the world of the book.

A junior government minister and his wife visit the orphanage. Each child is on his best behavior, hoping that the couple might adopt them. Werner has snuck a scientific book to the dinner table, called The Principles of Mechanics. The minister notices that Werner is reading during the meal and takes the book away from him. Jutta speaks up in Werner’s defense, saying that he is smarter in mathematics than their teacher and that someday he will be a famous scientist. The minister says that the only place that Werner will be going is into the mines, like all the other boys.

All of Paris discusses the rumors that the Germans are coming. Marie-Laure’s father dismisses her fears, saying that the director and department heads at the museum aren’t worried, so she shouldn’t be. The librarians and scientists go about their work at the museum. She reads and rereads Twenty Thousand Leagues and discusses sea creatures with Professor Geffard. She memorizes the scientific names of shells; Geffard describes the eons of evolution. She imagines the millennia behind her as Geffard explains that nearly every creature that once lived is now extinct and that there is no reason to think that humans will be any different.

As time passes, Marie-Laure imagines that she smells gasoline in the wind, as if an ocean of machines is grinding its way toward her.

Membership in State Youth—a Nazi youth organization similar to the Hitler Youth—becomes mandatory. Werner is exhorted to work hard—to live and die for the glory of his country. Werner sometimes spends all night working on complicated and advanced math problems. He creates many inventions. When a neighbor’s wireless breaks, Frau Elena suggests that Werner take a look at it. He fixes it. Soon all the neighbors call upon Werner to fix their broken radios. He is 13 years old.

Even the poorest households have a radio, if only a state-sponsored radio capable of receiving only German frequencies. The voice of the Reich reaches out to everyone through their radios.

In November 1939, Marie-Laure is taunted by some boys as she sits outside reading. They tell her that the Germans will kidnap her and make her do terrible things. Paris begins to prepare for war: gas masks are sold and windows are taped over with cardboard. She begins to have nightmares, even though her father insists that there won’t be a war. After the last war, he reasons, no one would be crazy enough to allow another one.

Jutta writes a letter to the French professor whose broadcasts she and Werner have been listening to in secret. It is now illegal to listen to foreign broadcasts. Though she and Werner have been using their radio, they have not heard a broadcast from the French professor in a couple of months. Jutta writes a letter to the professor to ask him why. No one will help her post her letter, so she posts it herself.

Werner’s 14th birthday in May 1940 is marked by a special dessert and Werner’s growing fears for his future. He has one more year before he will be sent to down into the mines with the other boys. Germany has become a machine, and he can no longer imagine becoming a scientist.

The war becomes a certainty in France. Marie-Laure’s father works until midnight or later, making keys and padlocks as the collections are packed up and sent away from Paris to secret locations. Marie-Laure turns 12 years old during the spring, and she gets the second half of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for her birthday. As June begins, radio stations begin disappearing and planes fly overhead. Paris waits for the Germans to arrive.

Jutta wakes Werner, crouching by his bedside as she listens to the radio. She tells Werner that Germany is dropping bombs on Paris.

Marie-Laure and her father join the panicked crowds of people fleeing Paris ahead of the German occupation. They sit in the train station, hoping that a train will arrive to carry them away.

A soldier arrives after curfew, asking for Werner to come and fix a radio. Werner is petrified that the soldier will discover the homemade, illegal radio hidden under his bed. He is further terrified to be taken to the largest, grandest home in the town to fix their broken radio. Herr Siedler’s house is full of forbidden things, including a powerful radio that could tune into any broadcast in the world, and cream on cake, which Werner is fed as his reward for fixing the radio.

Herr Siedler recognizes Werner’s intelligence and tells Werner that he intends to write a letter to someone in the government on Werner’s behalf to get him into a good school. Werner returns to Children’s House where an anxious Frau Elena and Jutta are waiting up for him. Frau Elena is relieved when Werner tells her that no questions were asked about any of the children. She has saved his dinner, a single potato, for him. After everyone is asleep, Werner carries his homemade, illegal shortwave radio outside and crushes it with a brick.

When no trains arrive, Marie-Laure and her father begin walking out of Paris. By noon, they are 10 miles west of their apartment and the farthest from home that Marie-Laure has ever been. By dusk, Marie-Laure’s stockings are torn and her heels blistered. She cannot walk any farther. Her father leads her to a field, and they share a dinner of bread and sausage. She asks where they are going and her father tells her that they are headed to a friend of the director of the museum’s house, and if he cannot house them, they will go to her great-uncle Etienne’s house in Saint-Malo. After Marie-Laure falls asleep, Daniel opens his rucksack, which contains his wood-working tools and a diamond. Three fakes and one real Sea of Flames have been sent out of Paris. He does not know if he carries the real diamond—all 133 carats of it—or one of the fakes.

Hours later, Daniel wakes to the sounds and sights of airplanes dropping bombs over Paris.