But if this is Benioff’s grandfather’s story, that’s the way it must have happened, right? Readers who look down on plot-driven fiction will learn something new, even if Benioff miscalculates with a too-neat resolution, which includes both a love interest and a coming-of-age challenge. He shifts tone with perfect control - no recent novel I’ve read travels so quickly and surely between registers, from humor to devastation - and expertly evokes the vagaries of Lev’s adolescence. The research never stands out because Benioff weaves it in so deftly. I know of no such phrase in Russian, but in an English-language novel simulating Russian speech, it captures precisely the maternal obsessions of Russian swearing. Benioff could have read in a history book - or learned from his grandfather - that cannibals first went for the buttocks, “the softest meat, easiest for making patties and sausages,” but an expletive that a passing driver shouts at Lev and Kolya requires a sixth sense. Very soon, the odd couple are dodging a husband-and-wife team of cannibals and seducing their way - well, Kolya is, at least - through the starving city.īut it’s never cavalier, because the author has done his research. It would be easier to find snow in Saudi Arabia, but if Lev and Kolya can locate a dozen they’ll get back their ration cards - and their lives. Awaiting execution, they’re summoned by the secret police: Colonel Grechko’s daughter is getting married, and eggs are needed for the cake.
Lev, an intelligent, awkward, eternally self-doubting Jewish teenager, and Kolya, a Slavic Adonis, have been imprisoned after wartime infractions. Happily, Benioff’s prose doesn’t draw that kind of attention to itself. For some writers, Russia inspires extravagant lamentations uttered into the eternity of those implacable winters. And after that first chapter Benioff is humble enough to get out of its way. In fact, the novel tells a refreshingly traditional tale, driven by an often ingenious plot. Before Lev begins to tell his story, however, a young Los Angeles screenwriter named David visits his grandfather in Florida, pleading for his memories of the siege.
“City of Thieves” follows a character named Lev Beniov, the son of a revered Soviet Jewish poet who was “disappeared” in the Stalinist purges, as Lev and an accomplice carry out an impossible assignment during the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. See what I mean?īenioff’s new novel reveals why there are so many Russians - not oligarchs or prostitutes, but soldiers and old babushkas - in this nice American boy’s fiction. (They should just get it over with and put the man in the movies already.) He takes his morning orange juice next to Amanda Peet. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee’s most heartbreaking film, “The 25th Hour” - for which Benioff was asked to write the screenplay, leading to a second career in Hollywood.
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