By Hilary Krutt | Off the Shelf Thursday, November 06, 2014Each time I sat down to read Anthony Doerr’s recent National Book Award nominee, All the Light We Cannot See, I found myself cocooned in his velvety evocations of Saint-Malo, an enchanting French city perched upon the sea. His narration was captivating and his characters multidimensional, but I was most compelled by the distinct sense of place. I could feel the German gunfire rattling the protagonist’s ancient house and smell the salt of the ocean waves wafting from the shore. This experience could hardly be classified as reading—devouring is perhaps a closer approximation.
Seeking out more of Doerr’s talent for awakening the senses, I picked up Four Seasons in Rome next.
This memoir details the year he spent as a writing fellow in Italy, living with his wife and their twin infant sons. It was during this time that he developed the bare bones of what would, several years later, take shape as All the Light. Here I found the same mouthwatering depictions of a European city seeping with history, with Italian piazzas taking the place of French castles and uneven cobblestoned streets in lieu of attics perched above the sea.
In Four Seasons, I was struck by Doerr’s tender articulation of the difficulties of settling into a life thousands of miles from home. Rather than being transported to an imagined place, I found myself absorbed in my own memories. I had recently spent my own four seasons abroad in Paris, and in every one of Doerr’s cultural gaffes or linguistic mix-ups, I saw a glimmer of my own gauche missteps
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