All the Light We Cannot See Review New Yorker

"The more sentimental, the better," reflects Werner, the albino Nazi kid prodigy in Anthony Doerr'southward surprise bestseller, All The Calorie-free We Cannot See. Here, as in the war, Werner picks the wrong side. Sentimentality is a potent and cheap smokescreen. It shelters us from the barrage of deeper emotions, and spares usa from their upstanding implications. It substitutes surfaces for depths, and glamor for complexity. A failure of gustatory modality is ever an ethical failure, too.

Doerr'southward novel, for those who have spent the terminal few months in a concrete bunker, is the impeccably implausible tale of two children defenseless in the violence of Globe State of war Ii. Ane of them is Werner, who, being an albino, is preternaturally gifted at assembling radios. His paramour, Marie-Laure, is a blind French girl, who, beingness blind and French, is decumbent to vague musings on the wonders of nature. The Nazis, who are handsome and dastardly when they are non crippled and humane, assign Werner to the chore of hunting downwardly the hidden radios of the Resistance. Members of the Resistance, who are more interested in French recipes than French resisting, hibernate a radio transmitter in the firm to which Marie-Laure is evacuated, in the conveniently attractive seaside town of Saint-Malo. The plot grinds toward the meeting of Werner and Marie-Laure with the subtlety of a Tiger tank. The story ends with multiple detonations of high explosives and twee sentiment.

The blond leads the blind: Werner leads Marie through the rubble to safety, but dies past stepping on a landmine. After enduring and then many of Werner'due south trivial reflections, we are spared his terminal thoughts. They might resemble those of the reader, trying to identify fragments of actual history as they whizz past like and so much fictional shrapnel. A novel is not a historical certificate, but it does become one, regardless of its author'southward preference. Our entertainments reflect their times: how we cull to recollect historical events, and how we adopt to call up them. Especially when the worst of times, Globe War Two, becomes material for the lightest of entertainments.

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Historians phone call this sort of thing "normalization," or, if they are German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, "coming to terms with the past." Through books and films, we procedure the exceptional and traumatic into the banal and mildly diverting. In a new volume, Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past is Existence Normalized in Contemporary Culture, the scholar Gavriel Rosenfeld describes a dispiriting catalog of normalizing strategies, political and commercial. Normalization is integral to memory and is always with u.s.: the term "Holocaust" was popularized not past historians, only by a 1978 television series featuring James Woods and Meryl Streep. That said, the popularity of websites devoted to "cats that look like Hitler" suggests that what matters is less the normalization, and more how it is done.

Rosenfeld identifies three types of normalization: relativization, universalization, and aestheticization. The "relativizers" desire to diminish the "moralistic aura" that comes with "exceptionality," the taint of particularly bloodcurdling deportment. Recent practitioners include not just the obvious nationalist politicians, but also writers who, similar Anthony Doerr, equate the Allied bombing of German targets with the earlier German bombing of everyone else. In Air War and Literature (1999), Westward.G. Sebald described the Centrolineal raids with a Nazi term for the mass killing of Jews: a Vernichtungsaktion, an "act of extermination." Similarly, Jörg Friedrich's 2002 bestseller The Burn used Holocaust terminology to describe the suffering of German language civilians: Air raid shelters became "crematoria."

The "universalizers" desire to inflate the aura of exceptionality and liberate it as a license for present ambitions, peculiarly humanitarian intervention. In her 1999 essay "To Endure past Comparing," Samantha Power suggested that "Holocaustizing," the cartoon of analogies to the Holocaust, had helped "stir the conscience" of American politicians during the Yugoslav Civil War and the Rwandan Genocide. But Power also saw that "Holocaustizing" could exist counter-productive. Holocaust analogies did not force the Clinton assistants to intervene in Rwanda, or subsequently Srebrenica. The analogies could, however, attract a "backfire from those who believe in the uniqueness of the Holocaust," and could even encourage passivity: Past comparison to the Holocaust, every humanitarian crunch might await "not so bad after all."

The third circle of normalizing Hell is reserved for the "aestheticizers." The West, Rosenfeld writes, has a tradition that "historical events should be depicted from a realistic perspective." Realism respects "a prevailing desire to preserve the integrity of the historical record." This desire has "clear moral underpinnings," even if, as with many of our moral underpinnings, nosotros notice the principle in its breach. Many of those breaches are inspired by another tradition, more recent in origin, but now familiar to the indicate of tedium: the defection against realism and its ethical implications. If the past can exist shorn of its historical reality, information technology sheds its historic traditions, and the upstanding demands they identify on the present. Non all "relativizers" set out to neutralize the by. Many "relativizers" adopt new forms of representation in the hope of expressing "deeper moral agendas." Sometimes they attain them. Chaplin and Mel Brooks prick the vanities of Nazism by ridicule. The fractured narrative of Elem Klimov's 1985 moving picture Come and Encounter is a devastating recreation of the trauma of a child in the path of the Blitzkreig.

For Rosenfeld, all three forms of normalization distort the "historical record." Yet aestheticization is peculiarly risky. It is less nigh the "moral dimensions of the by" than the "artistic challenges of representing it." In that location is an inherent risk of "sacrificing substance for superficiality"—of falling for surfaces over depth, and for simplicity over complication. Over time, this preference for form over content empties out the past. The willful amnesia of "normalization" smoothes out the abnormal discomforts of retentiveness. Only the pretty, reflective surfaces remain. Beauty, Oscar Wilde wrote, "reveals everything, because it expresses nothing."

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Doerr'due south novel is an unsavory mixture of "relativizing" and "aestheticizing." As a relativizer, he presents all violence, Nazi or Centrolineal, as equivalent: the product of amoral, deterministic forces. This mechanization might impaired the moral sense, just information technology raises the aesthetic value. As an aestheticizer, Doerr admires the shiny boots and tailored uniforms: Fascism, equally Susan Sontag noted, e'er fascinates. At that place is, though, little depth to his reflections.

Ethical dilemmas, sadistic violence, technological cruelties, and sexy uniforms are all splendid sources of period style and emotional intensity. Just, like rations of ersatz java and powdered egg, they are set up-made substitutes for the existent thing. Realism brings us closer to the past, and to an understanding of its divergence. The aesthetic perspective distances, and flattens difference. Instead of horror or heroism, nosotros see only a lazy reflection of our ain preferences and prejudices. Doerr's German children speak similar modernistic American children: they "do math on their fingers", and call each other "gimp" or "pussy." Doerr's narrator speaks of "skunked" vino and "taffy-colored" hair. The departure between past and present has vanished.

Moreover, Doerr's writing is pompous, pretentious, and imprecise. Every noun is escorted past an adjective of reliable merely uninspiring quality. Eyes are "wounded." Brownish hair is "mousy." Absurdly, Wehrmacht recruits are "greyhounds, harvested from all over the nation for their speed and eagerness to obey." I always thought greyhounds were bred, not picked similar fruit. But and so, I'm not a scientist. And neither is Doerr. He clutters his novel with technological whimsy about fourth dimension, speed, and connexion. Every event, especially a fatal 1, is "destined" for reasons as well mysterious and complex to explain. Scientific discipline is an object of gawping wonder, but its merits remain beyond description, venerated but incommunicable.

"The incommunicable," Sartre observed, "is the source of all violence." There is a lot of violence in this novel. Most of it is sexualized and sadistic, slick with the voyeurism of horror films and pornography. Trapped in an cranium for days, Marie-Laure is tormented by her imminent rape or murder at the hands of the man who has cleaved in downstairs; outside, the state of war auto approaches, "grinding and grinding its inhuman truth into the floor".

The boys at Werner's war machine academy hunt their weakest members beyond the fields, then beat them with a thick rubber hose. The narration strokes the monstrous implement of penalization—"blackness, three anxiety long, strong in the cold"—and savors the hurting it causes. When the boys find that dreamy Frederick has hidden his weak eyesight, they force-feed him eye charts, and then vanquish him into a vegetative land. In that location are mock executions, and the ritual killing of a Slavic prisoner who is tied to a stake and freezes to death after repeated dousing in cold water.

Did I mention Doerr's Sea of Flames? Apart from being a Wagnerian metaphor, the Ocean of Flames is a diamond with magical powers. Marie-Laure's father must hide it from the diabolical Nazi jeweler, Sergeant von Rumpel. We know he is diabolical considering he walks with a limp, wheezes a lot, and has uncharitable thoughts about Jews.

Sergeant Rumpel is not the merely villain to telegraph his wickedness by his ugliness. There is the one-armed sadist who leads exercises at Werner's military academy, the cock-eyed soldier who is only following orders, and the French collaborator with bad breath and a weight problem. Centre trouble, on the other hand, indicates virtue in Doerr'due south aesthetic, but also the kind of torments that stigmata portend for a medieval saint. Autonomously from blind Marie-Laure, the merely other kid with a conscience is Frederick. He gets pulped by his boyfriend cadets for hiding his myopia, and Marie gets bombed by the Americans.

When World War II is reduced to a conflict between technological determinism and innocent children, the divergence between aggressors and defenders is erased. We see no evil, only "normalized" reflections in the Ocean of Flames. Sometimes, the aesthetic is but an anaesthetic.

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Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/120769/problem-anthony-doerrs-all-light-we-cannot-see

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