“That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn’t let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn’t admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.”
Dates read: March 10-15, 2017
Rating: 9/10
Friendships that form under intense circumstances can be especially enduring. Most of us are or at least know someone that’s still friends with someone they met at college orientation, just because you find yourselves thrown together at a vulnerable time. It quite often has little to do with what you actually have in common, but something about sharing new and interesting experiences with a person bonds you in a way that’s hard to compare. I think of some of my law school classmates almost as war buddies.
In David Benioff’s City of Thieves, Lev Beniov is an introverted Jewish teenager living through the siege of Leningrad during WWII. One night, watching for air strikes on the roof of his apartment building with his friends, they spot a paratrooper and race through the streets (well after curfew, of course) and run after him. The man is dead, and the teenagers steal whatever they can off his body, with Lev in particular snagging a knife. The police spot them and the kids run…but Lev is caught. Thrown in the notorious local jail, he thinks he’s dead. Then his cell opens in the night to admit Kolya, a bold 20something in a military uniform who claims that he was snagged after going AWOL to defend his thesis. Instead of being executed in the morning as Lev fears, he and Kolya are given a task: to collect two dozen eggs in a starving city for a wedding cake.
What emerges from there is a fairly predictable quest narrative. Lev and Kolya journey within the city and eventually outside of it to find the eggs they need to get their ration cards (i.e. their only link to the extremely limited supply of food) back, and as they encounter characters and obstacles and characters who are obstacles, they grow closer. We know that Lev survives into the present day because of the framing device Benioff uses, in which he presents Lev as his own grandfather relating the story to him, but exactly how he does, and what will become of the people around him are unknowns that propel the plot forward. Both Kolya and Lev are well-written characters, and although the structure of their journey is a familiar one, Benioff’s prose is lively and entertaining and a pleasure to read.
I was happily surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I picked it up because Benioff is a producer of Game of Thrones, one of my favorite TV shows, and I’d heard it was pretty decent, but I usually have a hard time connecting with stories that feel decidedly “masculine”. But this was a coming-of-age story that wasn’t overly steeped in gendered notions of what that means. It’s still more masculine than feminine, but not to the point where I felt alienated from it as I often do with stories that posit violence and/or emotional repression as what it means to become a man. It’s as much as anything a story about a brief, intense friendship that forever changed a teenage boy, and who can’t relate to that narrative? I definitely recommend this book, I’m already looking forward to re-reading it someday when I finally read through my TBR.
Tell me, blog friends…have you still got friends that you made when you went through hard times together?
One year ago, I was reading: In The Skin of a Lion
Two years ago, I was reading: The Name of the Rose