Knowing this is a much-loved modern classic, let me tread carefully here.
Going into All the Light We Cannot See, I had heard nothing but great things about it. How enchanting the story is, how the writing will sweep me off my feet, how I will come away changed as a person. And I admit, it does have beautiful prose everywhere. But that isn't enough to save it from being a complete dud.
Essentially, a book with more than 500 pages can't just be made up of nothing but beautiful, flowery, descriptive prose. Things need to happen, plots need to advance, characters need to grow. But so little of that actually happens in this long book. And when something exciting does happen, there is flowery descriptions and random musings embedded right in the middle of it, slowing down what little forward progress there is.
It reminds me of school assignments back in the day, when I'm told to expand on what I've written. But I had no more content, nothing more to say, so I just found different ways to write the same thing over and over, hoping the teacher wouldn't notice. In this way, I would achieve writing alchemy, turning one sentence into four sentences. And that's what happened here.
The book has a dual timeline, alternating between 1944 and the years leading up to it. But that didn't really work for me. The story would have been the same told in chronological order, so the switcharoo back and forth, instead of adding tension or suspense, only led to confusion. The odd thing is that 1944 is supposed to be the climax of the novel, but those sections are so slow and boring, filled with almost no progression of the storyline, merely descriptions of streets, walking, digging, sitting, hiding...
So many people love this book, but it just isn't for me. I fell asleep multiple times while reading it and almost gave up. It's the sort of book where you can pick out any page and be impressed by its descriptive beauty, but when you read the whole book it ultimately is tedious and uninteresting.
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