City of Thieves by David Benioff

The Barnes & Noble Review

David Benioff has made a specialty out of crafting characters who achieve some measure of success -- fame, fortune, athletic prowess, or beauty -- but who simultaneously see through it. They are haunted by the compromises they’ve made to get to the top. A screenwriter, Benioff is best known in the literary world for his 2000 novel, The 25th Hour (later filmed by Spike Lee, with Benioff's script). That book featured a handsome New York city drug dealer named Montgomery Brogan -- a working-class boy forced to appear tougher than he felt -- who was whiling away his last hours as a free man before heading off to a notoriously brutal upstate prison. Monty was an antihero, but Benioff made the reader root for him as a self-aware cog in a flawed universe.

Similarly, in the short stories of When the Nines Roll Over, Benioff presented characters such as Tabachnik, a brilliant A&R man ambivalent about selling out his artists, and June, a prosaic waitress who knows getting her big break as an actress means leaving her pure-hearted boyfriend. Benioff’s characters were smart but not happy, because their intelligence forced them to scorn easy consolations.

The characters in City of Thieves, set during the 1941 siege of Leningrad, are something different. They are idealists in spite of their own misgivings about the world; idealists in spite of their pronounced suffering. Benioff makes his hero a true underdog -- a bright but gawky 17-year-old named Lev who is a self-described "runt from birth." Lev has a big nose, "skin scribbled with acne," and "the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews, two of the gloomiest tribes in the world." Lev is skeptical without being jaded. This is not because he hasn’t had enough experience -- though he is a shy virgin, Benioff makes clear that Lev has seen and heard more by the age of 17 than most people will in a lifetime, including the "disappearance" of his father from the literary magazine where he worked -- but because disillusionment would require reaching a level of comfort impossible in a war-starved city, where the focus must be on daily acts of survival.

Benioff brings this sense of destitution to vivid life, depicting the autumn wind that blows only the shutter hinges of buildings, since the shutters themselves have been torn down for firewood. "Every wood sign, the slats of the park benches, the floorboards of shattered buildings -- all gone and burning in someone’s stove." The rationed bread is so hard that people break their teeth trying to chew it. In a black market area where general’s wives and party members once traded their jewelry and silverware for food (" 'So eat your silverware,' " the peasants say, if anyone objects to the price), men are now selling glasses of dirt. "Badayev Mud," it’s called, "taken from the ground under the bombed food warehouses and packed with melted sugar." Another vendor sells "library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper."

Lev chooses to remain in Piter (the name "every native used, but banned from all Soviet text because ‘Saint Petersburg’ was a czar’s arrogance") when his mother and sister are evacuated, shortly before the Germans encircle the city. He does so out of an adolescent’s desire for adventure, "flooded with a belief in my own heroic destiny." Volunteering as a firefighter on the roof of his building at night, he mans water buckets, sand, iron tongs, and shovels while he and other residents search the sky for bombs. When Lev abandons his post to loot a German paratrooper’s body for food, breaking a strict curfew, he is arrested and placed in a prison cell with a man named Kolya, a beautiful Cossack with high cheekbones and hay-blond hair, eyes "blue enough to please any Aryan." Kolya is a smooth-talking swindler accused of deserting his Red Army unit. His life, like Lev’s, is temporarily spared only because a ruthless NKVD colonel needs help with a particular task: finding a dozen eggs, within the next five days, to make the cake for his daughter’s wedding. "My men say there are no eggs in Leningrad," the iron-faced colonel informs Lev and Kolya, "but I believe there is everything in Leningrad, even now. I just need the right fellows to find it. A pair of thieves."

It is a truism of the adventure story or quest narrative that the object to be attained (the Holy Grail, the hidden treasure, the power-giving rings) is of less importance than the journey itself, which forges the hero’s character. In City of Thieves, the quest for a dozen eggs takes Lev and Kolya behind German lines in the devastated countryside, brings them into contact with dangerous partisans and ravenous cannibals, leads to their capture and the murder of several high-ranking Nazis -- but the eggs serve primarily as a means to the book’s larger end, which is showing how a friendship forms between the insecure Lev and the wily Kolya. Their odd-couple banter, which consists primarily of Kolya’s boasting of his sexual conquests and Lev’s doubtful rejoinders, does not contain a single false note. As befits an accomplished screenwriter, Benioff moves the plot along with a suspenseful celerity. His prose is scrupulously, almost unnervingly excised of inessential detail -- the starkness of Hemingway crossed with the authenticity of Richard Price.

There are times when this world feels too seamlessly rendered, the loose ends tied up too neatly when what one wants is some enduring mystery, the ambiguity associated with more complex literature. But the novel Benioff has written is one where characters poke holes in the notion of artistic greatness, and rightly so. One of its best scenes occurs when Kolya and Lev hear a pianist playing in a dark house, on a deserted Leningrad street. There are shells falling off in the distance and the music is strange and unfathomable. It is a song that Lev, who knows all of Mahler and can "identify any of Chopin’s twenty-seven etudes after hearing a few bars," has never heard. "It was music for wartime," he thinks, and "when it ended, something seemed wrong: the performance was too good to go unacknowledged, the performer too skilled to accept no applause. For a long moment we were silent, staring up at the dark windows." Lev believes it could be Shostakovich himself, but Kolya spits on the sidewalk at the thought.

"They evacuated Shostakovich three months ago," he says. The ordinary people -- the ones who have yet to distinguish themselves -- are all that remain, and they must fend for themselves. --Andrea Walker

Andrea Walker is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. Her reviews have appeared in Bookforum, The Hartford Courant, and the Times Literary Supplement.

From the Publisher

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival—and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.

During the Nazis' brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter's wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible.

By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.

The Washington Post - Thomas Meaney

City of Thieves is a coming-of-age story brilliantly amplified by its war-torn backdrop…At times Lev and Kolya seem too free from the strictures of Soviet ideology: They each come equipped with an improbably deep understanding of their society. But for the most part, they and the minor characters satisfyingly inhabit the historical wreckage, and Kolya and Abendroth are especially memorable. But Benioff's finest achievement in City of Thieves has been to banish all possible pretensions from his novel, which never wears its research on its sleeve, and to deliver a rough-and-tumble tale that clenches humor, savagery and pathos squarely together on the same page.

Publishers Weekly

Author and screenwriter Benioff follows up The 25th Hourwith this hard-to-put-down novel based on his grandfather's stories about surviving WWII in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty for this infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of the starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside. There, Lev and Kolya take on an even more daring objective: to kill the commander of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic observer of the devastation around him, Lev is an engaging and self-deprecating narrator who finds unexpected reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms an unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies' man who is coolly reckless in the face of danger. Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser. (May)

Barbara Conaty - Library Journal

Looking for the feel-good World War II book of the year? This tale of two miscreants in Soviet Leningrad might be the one, as Lev and Kolya bumble their way toward locating a dozen eggs for a stern Soviet colonel who needs them for his daughter's wedding cakes. The city is at the gates of starvation (achingly portrayed in realistic detail), so the boys set out into the enemy-occupied countryside. Delivering the eggs will release them from their death sentences, as Lev was caught looting the body of a downed German paratrooper and Kolya deserted his unit to visit girlfriends. Coming upon partisan cadres and Germans, they find little success in their perilous saga. With deftly sly humor, respect for the agony of warfare, and dialog that elevates the boys-to-men story beyond its typical male ribaldry, this second novel (after The 25th Hour) by screenwriter Benioff (The Kite Runner) deserves a bright spotlight in most libraries to attract readers young and old to its compelling pages.

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist and screenwriter Benioff's glorious second novel (The 25th Hour, 2000) is a wild action-packed quest, and much else besides: a coming-of-age story, an odd-couple tale and a juicy footnote to the historic World War II siege of Leningrad. It's New Year's Eve, 1941, and Lev Beniov is alone in Leningrad. (Note that last name: This novel was sparked by tape-recorded memories of author Benioff's grandfather.) The 17-year-old's mother and sister were evacuated before the siege began in September; his father, a respected poet, was "removed" by the NKVD in 1937. Lev's real troubles begin when a German paratrooper, frozen to death, lands on his street. Lev deserts his firefighter's post, steals the German's knife, is arrested by soldiers and jailed. His cellmate is 20-year-old Kolya, a boastful Cossack deserter, dazzlingly handsome in contrast to scrawny Lev, who hates his telltale big nose (he's half-Jewish); their initial hostility turns into the closest of bonds. Sparing their lives, for now, NKVD Colonel Grechko gives them a near-impossible assignment in this starving city: five days to find a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. There's nothing doing on the black market. Then Kolya hears of a poultry collective . . . behind German lines. That's where they must go, decides Kolya, and Benioff makes his boundless self-confidence entirely credible. Over half the novel happens in enemy territory. Lev and Kolya stumble on a farmhouse where four pretty Russian girls are being kept as sex slaves by a Nazi death squad. (The connection between sex and death is a major theme.) The slave-owners are killed by Russian partisans, one of whom is the deadly sniper Vika, a young tomboy whosteals Lev's heart. Despite a "parade of atrocities," the pace will keep your adrenaline pumping right up to the climactic chess game between Lev and a fiendish Nazi officer. This gut-churning thriller will sweep you along and, with any luck, propel Benioff into bestseller land. Agent: Tracy Fisher and Raffaella De Angelis/William Morris

What People Are Saying

Dear David,

I had the immense pleasure of reading City of Thieves in one sitting on a flight from San Francisco to Paris last week. I may have looked up from the pages a grand total of three times. I was riveted and utterly trapped. And when I was done, just as we were approaching De Gaulle, I already missed your voice and the company of Lev, Kolya, and Vika.

What continues to amaze me about your writing, David, is that I cannot think of any other contemporary writer whose craft and skill boasts such diversity. Nor can I think of anyone out there who does it all with such aplomb, intelligence, and heart.

So many scenes from City of Thieves have been imprinted on my mind. The boy, Vadim, clutching Darling. The sad and darkly funny fate of Darling. The shocking scene at the cannibals’ lair. The field of dead dogs. Zoya’s horrible fate (which brought to my mind stories of how militiamen in Kabul killed civilians with similar savagery). The relentless suspense of the chess match with the Einsatz commander. There was something at stake on each page and the story never once failed to surprise, thrill, or move me. Your prose is graceful in a very effortless way. This book is quite an accomplishment, David, and should go down as one of the great contemporary war novels. But of course, it is much more than a war novel. I admire and envy what you have done. We had to wait six years for your second novel and I only hope that you do not wait as long next time to write another.

At any rate, you should be very proud of this book.

Yours,
Khaled

(A letter to the author from Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns)

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