![]() ![]() Human history, too, subverts their best intentions.ĭoerr's new novel, "All the Light We Cannot See," set in Europe during World War II, portrays a blind French girl and a German soldier fated to meet in August 1944 in Saint-Malo, on the Brittany coast. His characters struggle in a nonhuman dimension not always amenable to their control. ![]() Just look at his story collections, "The Shell Collector" and "Memory Wall," or his first novel, "About Grace." Yet he's able to unite those two Greek deities in a graceful dance, at once unfettered and elegant.ĭoerr's fiction often reflects his fascination with science and the natural world. It's Dionysus versus Apollo.Īnthony Doerr certainly crafts one finely tuned sentence after another. ![]() A Raymond Carver, by contrast, can seem wondrously spare, or thin gruel indeed. While some readers swoon to a Nabokov, others find his writing all too preciously rococo. In literature, of course, taste is everything. As the prose soars into an ethereal realm more akin to poetry, it calls too much attention to itself, and the author's artistic signature begins to feel more like bravado. The beauty of their language may detract from and retard their storytelling. Fiction writers whose forte is polished, crystalline sentences are sometimes their own worst enemies. ![]()
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