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.

“You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath…”

The book opens with the poem ‘Caelica 83’ by Baron Fulke Greville and these two lines remained with me throughout the book.

This is a book that speaks about life and about death and especially about that grey area in between — of sickness — that everyone must navigate their way through at some point in time or the other – whether as patients, doctors, family, caregivers, or friends – to emerge on either one side or the other.

It is also a book that illuminates the doctor-patient relationship in its purest form, shorn of all the different connotations and implications that modern living, technology, corporatization, and so on have attached to it. It is, at its most fundamental level, a relationship of trust, compassion and faith between two imperfect humans. At times, the doctor can seem all-powerful, interceding with fate on behalf of his patient, and bringing him back to life and health. At other times, the doctor and patient are “no more, and no less, than two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss.”

A heart-wrenchingly honest book by a young doctor who became a patient and ultimately lost his life to cancer, it does not in any way attempt to gloss over raw human emotions. There is the palpable disappointment, the feeling of cosmic injustice that after a decade of backbreaking hard work and commitment, training to be a neurosurgeon, when he is within reach of the dreams and goals he has set for his life, he should find himself terminally ill, a patient, on the opposite side of the doctor-patient equation than the one he had envisioned.

“My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close.”

“Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we are, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seems recognizable.”

There is confusion, and also acceptance: “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But, now I knew it acutely… The fact of death is unsettling. Yet, there is no other way to live.”

The epilogue, written by his wife Lucy after his death, is equally poignant and honest, and shows the immense power of humans to adapt, to even transcend their circumstances and to find the moments of pure joy that life sprinkles even amidst the harshest of tribulations. Their love for each other shines through the book.

“We each joked to close friends that the secret of saving a relationship is for one person to fall terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love…”

Paul “would, throughout his illness, work hard to secure my future. He was fiercely committed to ensuring the best for me, in our finances, my career, what motherhood would mean. At the same time, I worked hard to secure his present, to make his remaining time the best it could be…”

“At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him ‘Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?’ His answer was ‘It’s the only way I know how to breathe.’”

Finally, it is a book about life and about death, and about facing both with love, courage and integrity.

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.