City of Thieves
Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction
The siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Stalingrad) by the Germans in 1941 has inspired many books. From literary novels like Helen Dunmore’s achingly beautiful The Siege or Debra Dean’s poignant The Madonnas of Leningrad, to military thrillers like David L. Robbins’ War of the Rats or the movie Enemy at the Gates, and of course many histories, the books try to bring to life the terrible struggle for survival during that winter of starvation.
David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, falls at the suspense end of the spectrum. The narrator, a writer, decides to interview his grandfather, Lev Beniov, about Lev’s experiences during World War II. Family legend has always said that Lev killed two Germans before he turned eighteen, but Lev’s grandson has never known the details. Now Lev tells him how life changed when he stole a knife from a dead German paratrooper.
Caught looting the paratrooper’s body in the street, the half-starved teenager Lev is thrown into a prison cell with a talkative young army deserter called Kolya. He is sure he’ll be put in front of a firing squad, but it turns out that an NKVD colonel needs a favor. His daughter is getting married, and he needs a dozen eggs for a wedding cake. If Lev and Kolya can rustle them up, they’ll earn their freedom.
Lev can hardly imagine one egg, much less a dozen. The siege has made his city so destitute that the melted glue from book bindings is savored as “library candy,” and hunger and cold have weakened Lev so much that any quest seems impossible. But the optimistic and opportunistic Kolya is sure they can do it. So they set off to follow rumors of an old man who keeps hens.
Their experiences on this mad quest, which puts them in danger both from the Germans and from their own desperate countrymen, make a suspenseful story. There’s a little romance, too, as Lev and Kolya join a band of partisans, among whom is a skinny young female sniper. The appalling toll of cold and hunger and the shocking choices people make in order to survive form the backdrop of the story.
It’s hard to put down. Benioff is also a screenwriter and the author of The 25th Hour, an unusual contemporary suspense novel and character study about a young man facing federal prison for drug dealing. Judging from how different those works are, it should be interesting to see what Benioff comes up with next.
