ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Q & A | Further Reading

Q: What’s All the Light We Cannot See about?

A: The power of radio technology in the first half of the 20th century and its use as both an instrument of disinformation and liberation; a cursed diamond; children in Nazi Germany; puzzles; snails; the Natural History Museum in Paris; courage; fear; bombs; keys and locks; the magical seaside town of Saint-Malo in France; and the ways in which people, against all odds, try to be kind to one another.

Q: What does the title mean?

A: It’s a reference first and foremost to all the light we literally cannot see: that is, the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the ability of human eyes to detect (radio waves, of course, being the most relevant). It’s also a metaphorical suggestion that there are countless invisible stories still buried within the Second World War — that stories of ordinary children, for example, are a kind of light we do not typically see. Ultimately, the title is intended as a suggestion that we spend too much time focused on only a small slice of the spectrum of possibility.

Q: One of the things I noticed right away about the book is its distinctive style. It’s quite different from anything you’ve written before, and the structure is really captivating. Can you talk about how/why you structured the book this way?

A: I’ve been building up to this structure for a while, trying it out in various shorter forms. I started playing around with brief, titled sections in a short story about the Three Gorges Dam called “Village 113.” “Memory Wall” was the next progression: a novella told in short sections, each with a title, and this time the narrator roved between characters, as it does in All the Light.

The little titled segments present a way for me to be obsessive—if I only have a few hours, I can read through one, revise and try to improve it. I loved how constructing little pocket-chapters in All the Light offered me a chance to make small, manageable miniatures that I could refine over months, then string together into strands to tell a story. But this was the first time I tried a strictly binary structure -- A-B-A-B-A-B, Marie-Werner-Marie-Werner -- on such a large scale, oscillating back and forth between two protagonists in a kind of bilateral symmetry. I found that by suspending one narrative for a few pages and returning to the other, it generated some old-fashioned narrative momentum because a reader was left in suspense, wanting to know what was happening to the character we’d left. I also loved organizing the chapters in groups and seeing what kinds of patterns I could make.

Finally, I think this structure is a way to give a reader breathing room. I’m asking a reader to follow two adolescents here, through a lot of places and timelines, so I wanted her to be able to take a breath between chapters -- to see some white space and be able to let down for a moment before falling back in.

Q: The well never seems to run dry for WWII stories. Why do you think that is?

A: When I was writing the novel, a friend told me that if you took all the books written about the Second World War, ripped out the pages and dropped them on Germany, it would cover the entire country. I thought: Why would I ever presume to try to add another book to that pile? So I had loads of anxiety about trying to tell a WWII story that felt different or new in some way. I think at a time of abundance, when I can walk three blocks from my desk and buy an avocado or 60 rolls of toilet paper, stories of scarcity are appealing because they remind us of the blessings that we have. Whether it’s a scarcity of food and materials or a scarcity of freedom – just the freedom you and I have to listen to whatever music we want or go see whatever films we would like to see or walk to a bakery – one way to be sure that we aren’t taking our lives for granted is to read narratives from times when those freedoms were restricted.

Q: Can I read some of the book for free?

A: You can read a sample at Barnes & Noble, or listen to an excerpt from the audiobook at Simon & Schuster Audio.