Alice’s Reviews > All the Light We Cannot See > Status Update

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.
We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened.

"When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?"
He says, "Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did."

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.

'Chapter 159: The Simultaneity of Instants' was gut-wrenching in its entirety. Unfortunately I can't paste here the whole thing for future me, but I will safeguard the final lines and their goosebumps:

[...] Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale, Marie-Laure hears Werner scrape three fingernails across the wood, a sound not unlike the sounds of a record coursing beneath the surface of a needle.
He says, "Es-tu là?"

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: "Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth".

"Ready?" He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: "People have been arrested for less." And Madame Manec: "Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

Deep in Madame's voice, Marie-Laure hears water: atolls and archipelagoes and lagoons and fjords.
Etienne proves to be a tender nurse. Washcloths, broth, now and then a page from Pasteur or Rousseau. His manner forgiving her all transgressions past and present. He wraps Madame in quilts, but eventually she shivers so deeply, so profoundly, that he takes the big heavy rug off the floor and lays it on top of her.