The main question that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author poses in this book is: what are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of your calling, for the sake of your dream? And the answer is not so obvious.
Blind 12-year-old French girl Marie-Laure moves with her dad from Paris to Saint-Malo. She loves the sea, shells and is ready to spend all the time on the shore. And the 14-year-old German orphan Werner, the genius of radio electronics, dreams of getting out of the mining town to Berlin at any cost and doing real science, but Hitler comes to power and it turns out that the path to the goal is possible only through cooperation with the regime. Soon the boy is turning the radio tuning knobs in the Hitler Youth, trying not to think about how many lives his exact bearing will take. And the girl helps the French Resistance and, choking with fear, visits her shells on the shore. Anthony Dorr will only push them once to help each clear their choice. But the question that the author poses will remain: what are we willing to sacrifice for the sake of our vocation, for the sake of our dreams? Dorr wrote the novel not about the war. It’s about the meaning of life. “Why do everything, if not in order to become whoever you want?” And at some point, following the heroine, a thought pierces me: you don’t have to wait until the end of the war in order to live the way I want. I can do it right now. Nobody will stop me. The sentimental story, told in dry, almost newspaper language, from the very beginning evoked such keen sympathy for the heroes, such an uneasy joy for their small victories, that one has to remind oneself: this is only a book. But when she touched me personally, it was just right to swear to live a happy life: as if these were not heroes, but the American army liberated me. I finished reading the last hundred pages, shedding tears in the eyes of the astonished neighbors on the beach. An odd choice for summer reading. However, any season is suitable for making such an oath to yourself.
Translation from English by Ekaterina Dobrokhotova-Maykova. Azbuka, 592 p., 2015.