This is a book about stuff. It begins in the Paris Museum of Natural History, where the blind daughter of the locksmith, Marie-Laure, hangs out while her father works. His job is to protect with keys and locks the stuff - and there is lots of it around. There are mollusk shells, and gems, and dinosaur bones and stuff, stuff, stuff from all over the world. And one of the things in the museum is rumored to be incredibly powerful - and therefore incredibly valuable, especially as the Nazis approach Paris. It is a diamond - called the Sea of Flames - that is cursed. The owner will live forever, but those the owner loves will endure endless misfortunes.
This is a book about media. It begins in a coal mining town in Germany where a technical wizard named Werner lives in an orphanage run by a French Nun with his sister after his father was buried alive in the mines. He is able to make a radio out of bits of wire he finds in the trash and it brings into his life music, the propaganda of the third Reich, and lovely stories broadcast in French that describe to children how the natural world is constructed and address some of the precocious questions this very bright boy asks.
The book alternates from chapter to chapter between these two children, growing up worlds apart, but also lets us know that their fates are linked - they will meet, briefly, in St. Malo, a storybook city in seaside Normandy the girl runs to with her father when they flee Paris entrusted with the Sea of Flames, to hide it from the Nazis. A city that will be destroyed by the allies as they work to retake France. And a city that Werner will be directed to after he uses his radio skills to perfect triangulation as a means of finding and destroying radio operators in the field because Marie-Laure's uncle, the St. Malo resident to whom she fled with her father - and the very person who broadcast the lovely stories that Werner tuned into, is now broadcasting intelligence to the allies.
For a period of time the book bounces not just between the two children, but also adds in chapters about the Fuehrer's gemologist - the man pursuing the Sea of Flames. Initially he is in pursuit of it to add it to the collection that will be housed in Berlin of the great things of the world - though this is the kind of thing (in High School I read a book about the Spear of Destiny that Hitler tried to acquire) that Hitler would have wanted to personally own. This man, dying of cancer, becomes obsessed with the idea the that the gem will cure him, and he does not care about the cost: we are briefly introduced to his family, who would be cursed were he to achieve his goal. His pursuit becomes indicative, then, of not just the pursuit of Hitler, but of the German people who sell their souls to the devil in order to dig themselves out of a very deep pit that the First World War has left them in - the same pit that has imprisoned Marie-Laure's uncle in his home - fearing to leave it because of the ghosts who have haunted him since his own horror in the trenches.
So, this is a nicely told story - one that weaves together various elements to create the seemingly inevitable - perhaps only so in retrospect - denouement where all three characters come together at the same place and same moment in time, as the rage of war rains down around them. This meeting was more suspenseful than it sounds here - and felt chancier - more daring - and certainly more dangerous than I am able to give it credit for because I would like to focus on something that feels less central to the thrust of the narrative, but that this story may represent more viscerally, and that is our transition from the material world as our grounding and resonant point to the world of ephemera - one that is largely driven by electronic representations of others rather than material ones.
In Freud's view of the development of the infant, he was confronted with a dilemma. Why does the child become invested in the world around him? As infants, our needs are met by caregivers. We don't have to do anything and they materialize. What leads us to give up this cocoon like world in which others adore us and we adore being alive and cared for (he called this primary narcissism)? His answer was a simple one, that the child, driven, somewhat tautologically, by drives, invests in the things that gratify his drives. These things, from Freud's perspective, happen to be people, but later writers, most notably Margaret Mahler and then Daniel Stern in The Interpersonal World of the Infant proposed that it was not by accident that we get invested in people, but by design - and that our development is intrinsically caught up in connecting with and investing in our relationships.
But we shouldn't throw the old man out. We don't just invest in people, we also invest in things - in stuff. We will work for stuff - certainly for money - but to be able to acquire things. And when we meet a kid, he or she will frequently show us some of his or her stuff as a means of introducing him or herself. Maybe, through some kind of convoluted pathway, they have invested in the stuff because their dependence on others has been disappointing, but the stuff is always available, but maybe it is also because the stuff has been given to them by the others and they feel some kind of connection to the others through being connected to the stuff - and maybe just because the stuff is neat and they like to play with it and therefore it is a representation of their passions and what they have invested their passions in - and maybe for all of these reasons and more - kids will hand people their stuff as a way of introducing themselves.
The world of stuff, then, is a complex, interesting, psychologically charged world. Marie-Laure lives deeply in this world - she is drawn primarily to the mollusks and loves to feel their shapes - but more than just the dead mollusks which she organizes by shape and size, she ends up being drawn to the living mollusks - the snails which, as an adult, become her life work. She manages to invest in both the shells, but also the inhabitants of them. She uses the stuff as a means towards connecting more and more closely with the world around her. A world that is viscerally but not visually available.
Werner lives in a different world. One that is peopled by disembodied voices. He leaves his sister behind to go off to camp because of his radiological gift. There the propaganda becomes no longer disembodied; it is shouted by his fellow campers and brutally enacted. He sees the impact of the propaganda on his friend - a bird lover and quiet soul who doesn't belong in a camp to train future soldiers and pays dearly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Werner, who understands and, I think, loves both his friend and his sister ultimately fails them both through the very human sin of being concerned about his own hide. And the vehicle to safety - the stuff that will protect him - is the electronic world of radio - a world that can carry lovely voices opening up the world, but also propaganda that warps many of the minds of those who hear it.
So Marie-Laure, it seems to me, is living in the world of my parents. They were children of the depression, but also children of an era in which stuff got infused with meaning. Gifts were given, and the giver was remembered each time the gift was used - whenever an event occurred - like it started to get dark - and the "lamp that Uncle Wes and Aunt Nancy gave us for our wedding" was used, or simply in the act of putting on the sweater that Mom had given me that Christmas and I could feel the warmth not just of the wool, but of her choosing this particular object for me so that it reflected who I was - so that it fit and was of value and use to me.
Werner, on the other hand, seems to reflect the world of my children and my students. They snap-chat the latest experience to each other, knowing that it will be swallowed up and disappear in a heartbeat, and the triumph of knowing what is going on now seems to trump the fact that the picture will be gone never to be seen again. Books, which hold an almost sacrilegiously sacred place in my psyche, seem to have almost no pull for my students - the idea of building a professional library is anathema to them. And why, it seems to me they seem to wonder, am I assigning books for them to read - especially books by people who wrote 50 or 100 years ago, when they can access summaries of the work at the flick of a finger from anywhere at anytime?
It is as if my students don't need to know, when they are sitting with a patient, something deep and timeless about the human condition - something that is unpredictable that they need to know at that moment, but something that they can glean from these books, that they may put into their own internal system that is searched, not by subject or author but by feeling and intuition - by an associative network that is richer and deeper than anything Google will ever create. But I think that I have gotten derailed by a rant - for I, too, am drawn in by TV - to watch the ephemeral - and I have lost much of my earlier attachment to stuff - especially as there is more stuff seemingly than there ever was - and more distractions in terms of demands on time - much of it from electronic sources - and these sources, when they are embodied - whether as the cell phones themselves or laptops or even TVs seem outmoded only moments after they impress with the new and brilliant ways that they present information. It seems to be the information - the knowledge - and the connection with the people who are snap-chatting, with the wisdom of the people on Instagram and Vine and Twitter and Pinterest who are concisely and wittily summing up what is important, what is of interest, this kind of knowledge, is what is important.
So this book, read on this level, becomes a morality play about the ways in which things - like the Sea of Flames - protect us but endanger those around us. Marie-Laure, who ironically doesn't even know what she possesses, survives the war, but loses the people that she loves, indeed she loses the entire city that surrounds her while her home, and she within it, miraculously survives and is protected by someone whom she grows to love. We could expand the metaphor and suggest that the Sea of Flames engulfed all of France in the war - drawing the Germans to her wealth. France survives, but does so by enduring endless misfortunes.
Werner, on the other hand, is drawn not by things, but by things as a means of connecting with others and, through the machinations of the Third Reich, of using that connection as a means of killing others - sometimes, perversely and unintentionally. The dead in no way deserve the death that he has inflicted. He is haunted by his misdeeds, and does what he can to undo them - to do right by those he encounters now and to provide what he can to those whom he has left behind.
The after story of this novel nicely allows both Werner and Marie-Laure's stories to move forward in time, through a period not torn by war, and to come to somewhat peaceful conclusions. The fate of the stuff - the fate of the Sea of Flames - is left up in the air. Marie Laure has tried to leave it behind, but it haunts her 'til the end, and we don't learn its ultimate fate. Werner's connections with those he loves are traced - they were not erased by his pursuits nor by the propaganda that his machines transmitted. Quite the contrary, he seems to have remained connected, in his heart, to the people that he has left behind - and to the person, Marie-Laure, he has just met.
The author's final vignette explicitly includes the modern world of electronic connections. Marie-Laure's grandson is playing a video-game - something she cannot see, but can sense his investment in - and she can sense his return to being engaged with her once he has been killed in the game. He is also connected to stuff - anticipating his twelfth birthday, he is looking forward to being able to drive the moped. And he is connected, deeply connected, to Marie-Laure. Perhaps the author is trying to overcome his (and/or my) reservations about our entering this brave new world. A world that is populated by electronic strands that knit us together - with each other, but perhaps also with those who have died - or perhaps we have all died a bit as we have connected through the ether to people who aren't really people but just opponents against whom we test our ability to quickly press a button or our knowledge of trivia or whatever we are doing at the moment with whoever is out there. Perhaps we use these media to draw ourselves into the world - as Freud postulated we invest in things in order to emerge from our primary narcissistic state - but we certainly also use them to return to a narcissistic world; a world where we are inert - infantile - and entertained by the images flickering in front of us. Even if we have moved from a world that was only filled with stuff to one that is also peopled by various ghosts, we still face the same tension - the same dilemma of how to invest ourselves in moving forward when there are so many siren calls that promise forward movement while actually delivering solipsistic emptiness - as destructive if misused as any world war that was driven, at least in part, by the wish for stuff.
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