RSS Add-Me
City of Thieves by David Benioff
 |
City of Thieves David Benioff Fiction 2008 Rating: B- |
City of Thieves was sort of a given for me. How could I not read it once I'd heard about it? Leningrad, Nazis, World War II - right up my alley. Readers who are looking for another The Bronze Horseman might be a bit disappointed, however. This is a much more masculine read.
Lev Beniov is not living at the right time to achieve any sort of self-actualization. Young, Jewish, Leningrader - 1942 was a bad year to be any of these. At seventeen he finds himself all alone in his freezing cold apartment. His mother and sister were evacuated earlier, but Lev stayed on for the excitement. He spends his nights guarding the rooftops of Kirov, his apartment building. He spends his days trying to survive. One night on the roofs, he and his young fellow firemen spy a German pilot parachuting down into Leningrad, right into their section of the city. The novelty of this discovery overwhelms their common sense, and they abandon their post to locate the (dead) man and loot his provisions. Unfortunately, they are caught by the city police, and Lev is taken to prison for this misadventure. There he meets Kolya, a gorgeous young specimen of Russian soldier, who is accused of deserting his battalion. Neither the darkness of their shared cell nor the unhappy outlook for their future stops Kolya from scribbling in his notebook, quoting literature, or talking about sex. Lev frankly does not know what to make of him, but he has other things on his mind.
The next day Kolya and Lev get an fantastical reprieve: instead of a firing squad, they are assigned to find a dozen eggs for a certain Colonel Grechko's daughter's wedding cake. If they can locate them before the wedding, they will live. If not, they can expect to live on the run with no ration cards until they starve to death or are hunted down. Given this dubious set of choices, the pair sets out to find some eggs. The problem, of course, is there are no eggs to be found in Leningrad of 1942. Their quest will take them through the city and eventually behind enemy lines.
The way Benioff sets up the plot here allows him to explore via Lev and Kolya what horrors were occurring in mid-winter 1942. They were many and varied. The city, of course, is starving and frozen. Its citizens are down to unsustainable rations and are dropping like flies. Outside the city the Germans are committing a creative subset of atrocities on the rural population. Benioff draws the villains - Russian and German - realistically and humanly, although many of them act inhumanly. Unsurprisingly the novel has a rather high body count which is graphically described.
Lev, the main protagonist, is not incredibly likable. He has little confidence and few abilities that translate well into a war setting. He is grudging and grouchy and focused on his own weaknesses. His everyman qualities should have made him accessible, but instead he's just hard to like. Kolya is easier. Brimming with self-confidence, he addresses every person and situation as he would a prim lover, someone to be wooed. He is funny, charismatic, brave, and accepting. He is also obsessed with sex and his own bodily functions. Repeatedly he bemoans the fact that he hasn't had a shit in over a week. He has a willing female on every block of Leningrad and Lev gets a ringside seat to watch his technique. While this is believable behavior for an adolescent male living through a war, it was less than charming for me to read about.
Readers interested in the Leningrad setting will find a fair bit of history embedded in the novel, most of which seemed accurate. Lev and Kolya did seem to have more energy than most of the citizenry had at that point in the winter. They were able to walk the length of the city without too much difficulty. This was a bit more believable for Kolya who, being a soldier, would have had better rations than Lev. During their search they luck into several decent meals which, while necessary for the plot, also seems unlikely. There is also some running down stairs which, given that water was being carried and spilled from buckets over stairs daily, wouldn't have been possible. There weren't stairs in Leningrad of February, 1942. There were bumpy sheets of ice.
On the whole, though, this is an entertaining tale, insomuch as a string of wartime horrors can be entertaining. Lev and Kolya find themselves in a series of impossible situations and Benioff imbues them with humor, humanity, and suspense. There are few winners and many losers, but it is interesting to speculate on which side of the tablet Lev and Kolya will fall by story's end. City of Thieves is worth a read, a good way to spend an evening. Just don't pick it up when you need a pick-me-up because you will not find that here.