All the Light We Cannot See: Is Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel headed for the movies?

I’ve finally started reading All the Light We Cannot See. The Pulitzer Prize sticker on its cover, the deep blue infused, almost mythic image of Saint Malo, the National Book Award winner by Anthony Doerr can no longer be resisted. And even though I can’t source it in the usual trades I did read a report in The Tracking Board—which purports to be the source for ‘Hollywood’s Inside Information’—that Scott Rudin picked up the film rights for Fox Searchlight to adapt last spring. 

I hope that’s the case but if not, someone else is going to. I already know from the opening chapters that I’m going to love the book. As will anyone with a penchant for historical fiction and a fondness for France.

Here’s the rundown from the publisher if you’re as behind in your reading as I am. The novel came out in May, 2014.

“From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Photo Credit: Yannick Le Gal

So, boys and girls Dreaming of France. Have you read the book yet? Any ideas for the young Marie-Laure and Werner? And have you been to Saint Malo? I can’t wait to see the historic waterfront village on film, it’s so beautiful it doesn’t quite feel real to me. Check out this video peek at the village. 

Dreaming of France? See what other françophiles are up to at Paulita’s weekly meme.