The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr (of ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ fame)

Beautiful writing and intricate descriptions are ever the hallmark of Doerr’s writing, and this collection of short stories is no different.

In the title story ‘The Shell Collector’ Doerr again explores the theme of blindness (actually, this book came before ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ and is the author’s first book) in the story of a blind shell collector who inadvertently finds himself designated a miracle healer, thanks to a cone shell whose venom has heretofore unknown healing properties.

Among the characters who populate the stories are a hunter’s wife who can commune with dead animals, a Liberian refugee in Oregon, and an American museum employee who marries a Tanzanian woman and brings her home to Ohio only to discover how they are both inextricably linked to the landscapes of their homelands. Many of the stories are slow and melancholic, sometimes surreal, but other stories like ‘July Fourth’, about the competition between two groups of sportfishermen, from an American and a British anglers’ club respectively, to bag the biggest fish in Europe, inject a measure of levity into the collection.

The natural world and the close kinship between people and their surroundings are themes that run through the collection.

In all, an enjoyable read.

This is a book that reimagines the refugee/migrant crisis with a touch of magical realism in the form of “doors” that appear all over the world opening into different countries and continents. The doors that lead to the “nice” places are, of course, guarded and barricaded and difficult to get through, but still large numbers manage to slip through. With the doors making meaningless sieves of national borders, the very existence of separate nation-states is brought into question.

The story starts in an unnamed strife-torn country where two young people – Saeed and Nadia – fall in love amidst increasing chaos and approaching civil war.

“It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class … but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles, until the instant when it does.”

Saeed lives with his parents in a typical middle-class household. His parents – a schoolteacher and a university professor – have both “chosen respectable professions in a country that would wind up doing rather badly by its respectable professionals”, so that with the worsening situation and no means to get his family out to safety, his father is left to wonder whether “the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.”

Meanwhile, war looms ever closer with “front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes.”

When an opportunity to leave presents itself in the form of a door, Saeed’s father insists on remaining behind, knowing he will only compromise their chances of survival —  “he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all instincts that one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, for the child is now stronger than the parent and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required” (such a poignant, heart-breaking sentence, that.)

The story then follows Saeed and Nadia as they traverse the unfamiliar trajectories of migration from Mykonos to London to California, living in limbo for long periods, surrounded by other transients much like themselves such that no long-lasting friendships or bonds can be formed, and their own bond becomes as much a source of grating irritation as of solace and comfort.

For me, the story began to flag almost as soon as Saeed and Nadia stepped through that first door and left their home country. After a point, I failed to stay invested in them and in what became of their relationship.

There was also a marked shift in the narrative from the specific to the generic, and even there it was whimsical and unconvincing at times.

A case in point: There is a build-up to an imminent face-off, a hopelessly one-sided confrontation, between the military and riot police in London and the migrants who have taken over some neighbourhoods. After a brief skirmish, the military retreats and electricity and water is restored to the migrant-held areas. The author suggests that the powers-that-be “…had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done.”

Perhaps I’m being cynical but that seemed to me a rather simplistic interpretation, more like wishful thinking. I wonder if, when push comes to shove, such considerations will ever stop anyone. If history is any guide, hasn’t mankind committed some of its worst blunders and atrocities with its head held high? Regrets come much later, sometimes several generations later, if at all.

After a superb beginning that evoked the realities of a city slowly falling apart, the remaining story did not engage me, but the beautiful writing most certainly did. As you might have already gauged from the quoted extracts, the lyrical prose, strewn with little nuggets of wisdom and sparkling insights, makes the book well worth the time, and in all, it was a very satisfying read.

Review: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I took my time with this one. It is a book to be savoured not just for the story, but also for the beauty of its narration.

The story seamlessly weaves between two time-lines – Word War II and the years immediately preceding it — and I loved how masterfully the events and little revelations in each timeline inform and enhance the reading experience of the other as the story proceeds.

With Germany’s growing aggression, the tension slowly builds up till the Parisian air practically crackles with it. People go about their normal lives, but always, there is the undercurrent of rumour and anxiety. And then, finally, this one stunning, simple sentence – “The war drops its question mark.”

The story is about three ordinary people brought together by war.

There is Marie-Laure, a blind girl whose father has constructed a miniature wooden replica of the town of St. Malo for her to help her find her way around the real one. Like Marie-Laure, the reader too has likely not seen St. Malo with his/her own eyes. But, the book brings the walled city and its people to life in a vividly visual, sensual manner – the cathedral with its perforated spire down whose length “the flock of pigeons cataract”, the star-shaped ramparts, the rows of houses studded with chimneys, the market, the baker’s, the pebbled beach leading to the ocean that “sucks and booms…shifts and dilates and falls over itself”. And as Marie-Laure walks her fingers down the streets of the miniature model, naming them one by one, you realize that this must how she sees St. Malo in her mind – a living, breathing place, full of sights, sounds and smells.

There is Werner, a whiz-kid with a natural flair for electronics. Growing up listening to a science program on a discarded radio that he manages to fix, he does not want anything to do with war. All he wants is “string and spit and wire and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.” But, his talent with radios makes him a valuable cog in the German war machinery.

And, there is Etienne, a man who is still tormented by the ghosts of the First War, so much so that he has been afraid to set foot outside his house in two decades.  Yet, this frightened, traumatised, isolated man suddenly finds himself in the know of all that is happening in town, as he is co-opted into one of the most dangerous jobs there is – using his homemade radio transmitter to send news of townsfolk to their families, and clandestine military secrets to the Allies, across the water in England.

In all, it is a beautiful story about the innocence, courage and humanity that war slowly drains away, and also about the innocence, courage and humanity that, despite it all, remains.