Rating: 5 out of 5

A beautiful book. Two lives beautifully described with the shortest intersection. The idea I had a few years ago about timelines and intersections in a novel. Well written characters and involving landscapes. Lovely!

Highlighted passages:

everything radiates tension, as if the city has been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it toward the breaking point.

Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.

history is whatever the victors say it is.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

She stands alone in Madame Manec’s room and smells peppermint, candle wax, six decades of loyalty. Housemaid, nurse, mother, confederate, counselor, chef—what ten thousand things was Madame Manec to Etienne? To them all? German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

“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.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account