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^The books are beautiful outside as well as inside, and that makes me happy.
Cloud Cuckoo Land | Anthony Doerr
Memory Wall| Anthony Doerr
The Shell Collector| Anthony Doerr
All The Light We Cannot See| Anthony Doerr
Four Seasons in Rome| Anthony Doerr
About Grace| Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr (pronounced as door) writes with lyrical sensitivity.
Every word a poem,
Every sentence with aching beauty.
Paragraphs leave me breathless.
Doerr often tells his stories through the eyes of children, employing their innocence as well as the precarious razor's's edge of their coming of age. He loves to write about people who love nature, science, the study of the earth. His plots, intriguing in their own right, often yield to the patiently detailed descriptions of the particular time and place in which his characters find themselves. Complex emotions abound, and without offering any spoilers, it's fair to say that Doerr is a master of satisfying conclusions that don't always spell out every detail, yet provide the reader a bit of gentle space to imagine exactly how things might have ended up.
Of Doerr's six books, I could never choose a favorite but I can offer some distinctions between them, and a hint of the treasures that lie within.
In no particular order:
Cloud Cuckoo Land centers around an ancient and whimsical (fictional) folk tale about a man who, in his lifelong pursuit of visiting a celestial city, turns into a donkey and then a fish and then a bird. Doerr's story reveals how that folk story changes the destinies of three groups of listeners scattered across a millennium. Ideally suited for readers who enjoy discontinuities, shifting timelines, and loose ends that are gathered together in ways that simply take your breath away.
Memory Wall is a collection of short stories centered on the theme of memory, including one that follows a Chinese woman coming to terms with the fact that her ancestral village is about to be flooded by a new dam, and another featuring a woman who survived the Holocaust yet, many decades later, still dreams of her childhood friends who did not.
The Shell Collector is Doerr's debut - a collection of short stories featuring the connections between humans and nature. The title story highlights one of Doerr's signature scientific passions: sea shells; the final story plots the complexity of a married couple - one from Africa, the other Ohio - struggling to make a home in world that does not feel utterly foreign to either one or the other.
All The Light We Cannot See tells the story of children coming of age during World War II. We meet a newly converted French resistance fighter who happens to be blind, and a reluctant Nazi radio operator whose paths slowly and inexorably converge as they both struggle to make sense of the world around them.
Four Seasons in Rome is a memoir that documents the Doerr family's one-year sabbatical in Rome. Elegant descriptions of Rome's golden light, ethereal trees, and architectural treasures are interposed with unabashedly realistic descriptions of life with newborn twin sons.
About Grace is the story of one man, David Winkler, and his astonishing gift of premonition. One night he dreams that he will be responsible for his infant daughter's death, and in his frantic efforts to prevent that from happening, his life becomes utterly unmoored. The quality of Doerr's prose is exquisite: painful yet heart stirring, as fragile and infinitely detailed as the snow crystals with which David is consumed.
* * * * *
Last November, like many millions of other humans around Planet Earth, my husband and I enjoyed the Netflix four-part series of All The Light We Cannot See. Aficionado of World War II stories that I am, I Googled about to discover that the story was indeed based on a book, and I promptly put in a hold for a library copy.
What we eat is a poem.
Days later, casually texting with my second born, I mentioned that this story was a gem and suggested that she might like to read it. "I've already read it; I love that author," she explained. "Anthony Doerr wrote my favorite book."
My second born reads slowly and selectively. I didn't know she had a favorite book.
I was now on the edge of my seat.
Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw - a flower.
And so my daughter explained to me that during her college semester abroad, three months in which she studied art in springtime Rome, she was assigned to read Doerr's Four Seasons In Rome and fell under its magical spell. Doerr's unfailing ability to capture
the essence of Roman sunlight,
the gentle cascade of her flowering tree petals,
the splashing of her fountains,
the dark dank of her caverns and catacombs
and of course, the unspeakable treasure of her art,
put words to the overwhelming scenes and sensations my daughter was experiencing during her very own season in Rome.
I added that book to my library holds as well, and soon enough read every beautiful word.
(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.
I'd always known that this daughter of mine loved her time in Rome. But now I understood, in new, more specific ways, why she loved it. I saw the swallows flitting against the achingly blue sky, heard the waters of the Tiber gently lapping at the stone embankments, all but tasted icy sweet gelato on my tongue as the sun beat down on my back. I was there with her, and felt closer to her for the sharing.
Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor -- it is best done in shifts by well-rested people.
And I thought, isn't that the most wonderful thing that books can do, to give us a shared experience, to bring us closer together with other people, saying, yes, I understand you now.
Then I went and bought a copy of each one of Anthony Doerr's books. Because now, he is my favorite author too.
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