Behind the Story: All the Light We Cannot See

The Bookery
Oct 28, 2023
3 min read

We take you behind the story to examine the novel that inspired Netflix’s newest series

“All the Light We Cannot See,” a new series directed by Shawn Levy of “Stranger Things” fame, is set to premiere on Netflix on Nov. 2. The series is based on Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

All the Light We Cannot See is set during World War II and tells the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who has taken refuge in her uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after the Nazis invade Paris. The novel follows her life as it intersects with that of Werner Pfennig, a German orphan whose skills with radio garner him a place at a state boarding school in Germany and eventually in the Nazi military.

While we can’t wait to see the novel on the screen, we’re going behind the story to examine Doerr’s inspiration for the story, his writing process and more.

Where did the idea come from?

In a 2014 interview with NPR, Doerr said one of his first points of inspiration happened during a train ride from Princeton, New Jersey, to Penn Station. “We started going underground,” Doerr recalled. “The man in front of me was on his cellphone call—this was 2004—and the call dropped. And he got kind of angry, a little embarrassingly angry, unreasonably angry.” The experience caused Doerr to start thinking about the “miracle” of long-distance communication. “So … originally, the real central motivation for the book was to try and conjure up a time when hearing the voice of a stranger in your home was a miracle.” About a year later, Doerr visited Saint-Malo, a city on the French coast and became intrigued with how the ancient city survived the battle of Saint-Malo in 1944 in the final months of World War II.

How long did it take Doerr to write the novel?

Ten years! After that first inspiration, it took Doerr a decade to develop and research the idea. Doerr meticulously researched the era so the details in the book would ring true. For example, the type of radios used in German homes: “Even the poorest pit houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volksempfänger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies” (The Guardian). Doerr also read diaries and letters written during World War II and visited Germany, Paris and Saint-Malo during the writing process.

Why does Doerr think it’s still important to write about World War II?

Doerr recognizes that much has been written about World War II but says it’s important to keep examining the era for a number of reasons. One is so we don’t forget the reality of what happened: “We're losing thousands of people for whom World War II is memory every day. In another decade, there will be nobody left — very very few people left — who can remember the war. And so history becomes something that becomes slightly more malleable” (NPR). Another is so that we understand that while it’s easy to treat history as black and white, it usually isn’t. “My attempt in this novel is to suggest the humanity of both Werner and Marie-Laure, to propose more complicated portraits of heroes and villains; to hint at, as World War II fades from the memories of its last survivors and becomes history, all the light we cannot see,” the author said in a 2014 interview with Scribner Magazine for the Huffington Post.

Netflix’s “All the Light We Cannot See” series premieres on Nov. 2.

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