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Friday July 18, 2008

‘City of Thieves’ delivers on an eggs-ellent premise

by jessie hawkins
correspondent

“City of Thieves” is the kind of book that requires an abundance of snacks.

David Benioff’s latest novel examines wartime starvation. Readers with a modicum of sympathy will want food for the central characters, and a good nosh for themselves.

Benioff, who is Jewish, has developed a reputation as a budding novelist and screenwriter (he turned his novel “The 25th Hour” into a film for Spike Lee). He lives up to the rep in “City of Thieves.”

In the novel’s frame story, a young Los Angeles screenwriter talks about his Jewish grandfather’s adventures during the Nazi invasion of Leningrad during World

War II. In the story within the story, that tale comes to life when Lev, the grandfather, takes over the narration.

Lev and a solider named Kolya are accused of looting and desertion, respectively, and have their ration cards confiscated. But the young men are given a chance to survive. If they want to eat again, Lev and Kolya must find eggs for an army officer’s daughter’s wedding cake.

Hunted by Nazis and Russians, the two traverse Leningrad, and its outlying farmland and forests, on an impossible mission, hunting for what might as well be a dozen Fabergés.

The plot is a clever twist on the idea of putting all one’s eggs in a basket. Benioff handles the fragile trick without breaking a shell, replicating the Russian literary tradition of making the elegant look tough and the tough look elegant.

Lev, by his own admission, looks like a caricature of Jewish male adolescence. He has zero sexual experience and gave up on chess, the one thing he was good at. At 17, he’s like Portnoy without the knack for communication. Kolya is a tall, strapping, blond Casanova. He’s brave in combat and a passionate and strident Tolstoy critic.

The two match up well as an odd couple. Lev is a frustrated scholar while Kolya is a frustrated writer; one watches while the other does.

As Lev says, “[Kolya’s] confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny … I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews, two of the gloomiest tribes in the world.”

Benioff addresses Judaism more as a race than a religion. In that vein, Lev struggles with his faith — not in God, but in his friends and himself. His coming of age is emotional, not spiritual. When asked if Jews believe in the afterlife, he gives the shruggy response, “It depends on the Jew.”

In “City of Thieves,” the sky is always full of snow or wind or bombs or smoke, but never God.

The book’s graphic violence, if Benioff’s luck in screenwriting continues, could easily be translated to film. The violence is skillfully managed as the author navigates the horrors of war with the honest sadness characteristic in Russian and Jewish literature. Still, this is war: What many people are reduced to in the face of conflict and, yes, starvation is not a flattering.

Most readers will not close “City of Thieves” impressed by any government or comforted by any religion. But there is the chance that readers will finish the book in awe of the human capacity for love and friendship, even when there seems to be very little left in the world.

And this is how Benioff’s war story becomes a romance of the highest order. This is what allows the reader to want to eat while reading, to want to share aloud the best, most vivid descriptions, of which there are many. (Friends of readers, beware.)

War may be hell, but, as “City of Thieves” proves, the same cannot be said for all war stories.

“City of Thieves” by David Benioff (258 pages, Viking, $24.95)

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