Elusive Eggs (City of Thieves - David Benioff)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	City of Thieves - David Benioff
Date:	28/04/09 (195 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: touching, well told, informative

Disadvantages: none at all

"My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen." In my opinion this sentence stands a fair chance to be included into the all time list of brill first sentences. Whose curiosity isn't aroused?

A young American screenwriter is asked to write an autobiographical essay for a magazine but realises that he's led 'an intensely dull life'. He decides to interview his grandfather who grew up in Leningrad and lived there during the German siege from September 1941 to January 1944. Although the old man gives him enough material to fill more than one book, he wants to have some details clarified.
"A couple of things still don't make sense to me."
"David," he said, "you're a writer. Make it up."

This is what we get: On New Year's Eve in 1941, half a year into the German siege, 16-year-old Lev is imprisoned for looting a dead German pilot who fell out of the sky hanging in his parachute. After some hours a 20-year-old Red Army deserter joins him in the cell. Surprisingly, they're not shot at once but taken to a Colonel who tells them that his daughter is going to marry the following week. His wife insists on a traditional wedding cake, yet they can't find eggs anywhere in the city. It's Saturday, they have to be back by Thursday with a dozen eggs, if they aren't, they'll be found and shot, no doubt about that. He gives them 400 rubles and a curfew waiver in case anyone gives them trouble.

Thus begins an odyssey of the weirdest kind. Imagine the cold in Leningrad at the beginning of January, the city half empty because everyone who had somewhere to flee to has done so months ago, the remaining population already so starved that acts of cannibalism occur - and the two young men looking for eggs!

They are an odd pair, Lev mangy, pubescent, with a big 'semitic' nose (He's proud of being a half-Jew but doesn't relish looking like one), with a pessimistic outlook on life and Kolya a tall, handsome braggart, a womaniser and daredevil. Kolya feels it his duty to prepare Lev theoretically for the sexual pleasures to come and so it happens that they shuffle along on their search for eggs chatting about Kolya's sexual encounters. Kolya is not (only) flippant, he knows that he has to keep Lev awake and on his feet and which subject is better suited for this aim than sex?

Of course, from a business point of view it's always a good idea to include this topic in a novel because sex sells, but in my opinion the author needed something light and occasionally humorous as comic relief, as a counterweight to the death and destruction the young men encounter everywhere. The contrast between their private conversations and the macabre situation they're in and the harsh reality of the siege give the novel its special feel. The components are well balanced, too much of the first would make it too sentimental, too much of the latter would make it a war report for a news magazine.

Is the novel autobiographical as the author wants us to believe? Lev's surname is Beniov, the author's name is Benioff, he may be the narrator's grandson or not, the name may just be a device to lure the reader into the story. I remember Jonathan Safran Foer's novel 'Everything Is Illuminated' in which the main protagonist's name is Jonathan Safran Foer without it being an autobiographical account.

I could research the pedigree of the Beniov/Benioff family on the net, but to tell you the truth I don't care if the fictitious Lev is identical with the real life author's grandfather. For me the story is true on a higher level, every event could have happened in the way it is described, if not to one person, then to several, if not at the same place and the same time, then at different places and different times, it doesn't matter. By personalising the siege of Leningrad through the two young men the author gives me a faint idea of what life was like then. I know I'll never be able to get near the real thing - and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for 'the mercy of the late birth' to quote a German Chancellor.

The novel reminds me of my visit to Leningrad in the 1970s with a group of German 17-year-old pupils studying Russian at secondary grammar school. We went with Intourist, the official Soviet travel agency, private journeys weren't permitted then. We had a guide with us all the time and a schedule we had to follow.

One day we watched a kind of performance, photos and excerpts of films on the 900 days' siege of Leningrad were shown while an actress' voice read from the diary a girl had written. She described for some time how the family tried to survive - and then it just stopped, they all died of hunger. Despite the heroic, for our ears kitschy, music it was moving, for me more so than our visit to the Piskarevskoe Cemetery where about half a million dead are buried in 186 anonymous mass graves. That was simply too much. I don't know about other people, but I'm grateful if I get some help to grasp the ungraspable.

You may become impatient with my reflections and ask, "And what about the eggs?" Sorry, I won't tell you but I'd like to whet your appetite by giving away that four men die because of them, yet the story as a whole has a satisfying happy ending.

If you've been looking for a book lately worthy to spend some of your time with, you can stop now, you've just found one.

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Hodder & Stoughton Paperbacks
320 pages

Summary: an absurd adventure during the siege of Leningrad