As the title suggest, Jacques Lusseyran was both blind and a hero of the French Resistance. He also had the misfortune of dying in a car crash at age 46. And so I feel an almost moral compunction to be gentle with his memoir.
That said, I did not finish it. I almost gave up before the Germans had even invaded Poland (which happens somewhere around one-third of the way into the book) and ultimately did give up before Lusseyran was betrayed by a member of his own network (and I quit more than two-thirds of the way through).
The difficulty for me lies in that fact that And There Was Light reads as much like a philosophy treatise as a wartime memoir. I might have been okay skimming the pages upon pages of musings on the meaning of life and light and love, were the passages on the nature of the resistance work and the war itself more compelling. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. In fact Lusseyran sometimes skips over large chunks of his wartime experience with a single "the next six months were a battle."
No question, I admire Lusseyran's resilience and, yes, heroism. I wish that his story were told more clearly, however, and in a more focused manner. Readers of the Resistance will find these traits in The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944, which tells the broader story of the French Resistance.
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