City of Thieves.

Last night I finished reading “City of Thieves” by David Benioff. I know I’m coming late to the party because everybody else fell in love with this book like two years ago, but - you know - I’ve been busy …

It takes place during the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II. I happened to watch a documentary about that siege recently and found it was strange and interesting and just then I snapped my fingers and sat up straight and said to myself, “Hey, I should read that one book that everybody fell in love with like two years ago!” So I did.

It really is quite good. Probably one of the best novels I have read in a long time (and not just because I haven’t been reading a long of novels lately)!

I’m not giving anything away by telling you that it is about two young Russian men who are thrown together by chance and given the opportunity to save themselves from execution by finding a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of the daughter of a powerful NKVD colonel.

The ridiculousness of that fool’s errand (remember that Leningrad was under blockade for nearly three years and most of its residents starved to death) plays out against the incredibly bleak and otherworldly setting in a fascinating way. If this were an English class we’d talk about the “binary opposition” here. The whole novel functions like that and the author is incredibly skilled at moving between the abject horrors of that city, that time, that war, and the humanity of the characters; their humor, their hopes, their own lives.

Some of the moments are so ghastly that I feel strange describing the book as funny, although it certainly is funny. It just also happens to be occasionally soul-wrecking.

Better men than me have written better reviews than this, but I’m not trying to critique the thing. I just want to put it on your radar: IT IS A VERY GOOD BOOK AND YOU SHOULD READ IT!

I have one or two complaints about it, mostly just that it is a precision cut piece of writing. It is a little TOO clean and a little TOO perfect. (If you’ve seen the movie “(500) Days of Summer” then you know what I mean; a perfectly told story …  a little too perfectly told.) But that is a very small complaint and one that I would be happy to get as a writer (though no one will EVER say such a thing about me, because I ramble on with nary a single verbal filter, just coma after coma after coma, which - in my head at least - means that I am giving the reader a moment to take a breath while reading because I understand how exhausting some of my sentences can be to read).

To say much more about how and why “City of Thieves” is so good would give too much away, however I do want to mention that in addition to being very good, it does take the time to slow down and give us several small and moving moments that don’t advance the plot, they don’t fill in the characters, they don’t do much of anything but simply haunt the reader. There is a night when the two men pause in the street because they hear someone playing a piano in one of the empty, blacked-out buildings. They just stand there and listen to the ghostly sounds as snow falls around them and German shells echo in the distance. And then when the mysterious piano player finishes, our two heroes keep on walking. That’s all. There are several little moments like that which I appreciated greatly. I think the difference between a writer who is technically good and a writer who is transcendently good is often the patience to present us with the strange absurdities which fill up our lives but not always our literature.

.

.

.