City of Thieves

I was stuck in the bookstore--if anyone is "stuck" in a bookstore--and I gathered a stack of books to see what I felt like reading. I was failing miserably in my attempt to read through the NY Times notable list for 2011 (seven down, ninety-three to go) and had started and put down a dozen different titles in as many days. So I started through the stack, reading no further than the first page. One, two, four, six books, no luck, no zing, no first page tingles, no spark. Blah. I picked up another and another and put them down. I was in the mood for some quick-start, well-written fiction. Then I picked up David Benioff'a City of Thieves, opened it up to chapter one and read this:

You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feast we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier--all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages--eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.

These sentences, these models of beautifully constructed parallel clauses begins this tale of Leningrad (Piter, to its denizens) during World War II. Under siege by the Germans, everyone is starving, cold and desperate---with a few notable exceptions. City of Thieves tells the story of an odyssey, the journey of teenage Lev and the soldier Kolya, and their search for a dozen eggs in a place where all the chickens have long been soup. Benioff's novel is alternately horrifying and hilarious, gruesome and gratifying. It is a fast, effortless read, owing largely to Benioff's excellent pacing and beautiful syntax. It is no surprise to find that he is a screenwriter first, novelist second. His scenes are often cinematic in nature, and that is no criticism: some of the best writers conjure up the visual in just that way (Hawthorne, anyone?).

Both plot and character driven, I dare say no more just in case anyone actually reads City of Thieves (I hate it when people tell me what happens). I enjoyed the story so much that I stayed in that bookstore and finished the first two chapters before I got up and bought the darn book. City of Thieves, btw, was published in 2008---did I mention this was a used bookstore?