City of Thieves by David Benioff
January, 1942: the siege of Leningrad by Hitler's forces is taking its dreadful toll: every animal and bird, down to the last pigeon, has been eaten.
People by the thousands have starved to death and the canals are choked with corpses; those who still live are eating dirt and gnawing wood, others have committed the ultimate desperate act of cannibalism.
In the midst of this nightmare, a high-ranking communist official is planning his daughter's wedding. Miraculously, in the city of suffering and death, he has managed to accumulate enough delicacies for a wonderful wedding feast for his beautiful girl - one of the few women in Leningrad who can flaunt the energy and arrogance of the healthy and well-fed, but he needs eggs - a dozen, in fact, for a wedding cake; his daughter feels that it won't be a proper wedding without a cake! In the City of the Starving, surely that won't be expecting too much? Her father, ever-resourceful, reprieves two prisoners, reluctant cell-mates under sentence of immediate execution for the crimes of looting and desertion, and gives them an ultimatum: bring him a dozen eggs within a week, and their lives - and ration-cards - will be restored: fail - well, they'll starve to death anyway without the vital ration-card, which he has to power to issue or revoke.
Thereafter hangs the tale: a frightening odyssey in search of what has become unattainable by two very unlikely heroes - Lev, the looter, a small, starved Jewish teenager, for most of the time half-paralysed by fear and cursing the circumstances that landed him in prison to share a cell briefly with Kolya, the deserter, who swears that he is a good, loyal Russian soldier, defending Leningrad's outer perimeters - he just couldn't get a lift back to his unit in time!
As the week progresses and the risks and horrors multiply, an unlikely bond is formed between Kolya, the grandson of Cossacks, irrepressible, charismatic and handsome, the possessor of a detached, unnatural bravado, and Lev the Jew, in his own words 'not the type to inspire lust - worst of all, my nose, beak of a thousand insults! Bad enough to be a Jew in Russia, but to be a Jew with a nose from anti-semitic characature, well, it inspired a good deal of self-loathing'. It isn't that Lev is not proud to be a Jew; most of the time he is, but he doesn't want to LOOK Jewish. He wants to look Aryan, blond-haired and blue-eyed, broad in the chest and strong jawed. He wants to look like Kolya.
In light of where their frantic search for eggs takes them, appearances become entirely secondary to their frantic attempts to survive. The story proceeds at a breakneck pace to its inevitable denouement, ably helped by a host of strongly-drawn minor characters. Lev, despite being 'cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews, two of the gloomiest tribes in the world', comes into his own as a warrior for good in pursuit of the impossible, whilst Kolya, fearless and irresistible, will remain in this reader's memory for a long time to come.
And could anyone regard a cup of tea as just a mundane beverage after reading Lev's description: 'Tea: the warm glass felt like a living thing between my palms, a small animal with a heartbeat and a soul'. Compellingly and beautifully written, this novel is a page-turner par excellence: don't miss it!
Reviewer: Julia Kuttner
17 July 2008
