Review | City of Thieves by David Benioff

I love this book. I cannot recommend it to everyone, and I’m not sure who else will like it, but I found City of Thieves: A Novel beautiful, if tragic, sad, and raw.

Description from Goodreads: A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won’t talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds. Lev Beniov considers himself built for deprivation. He’s small, smart, and insecure, a Jewish virgin too young for the army, who spends his nights working as a volunteer firefighter with friends from his building. When a dead German paratrooper lands in his street, Lev is caught looting the body and dragged to jail, fearing for his life. He shares his cell with the charismatic and grandiose Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested on desertion charges. Instead of the standard bullet in the back of the head, 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 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 to find the impossible.

It would be hard not to place City of Thieves among the top novels I have read over the last year, if not the last five. At the same time, there are things about it that make it difficult to recommend to many of the readers I know. Benioff’s characters are as raw and desperate as the dirty and starving city they live in, facing nearly impossible odds in their search for eggs.

As crude and earthy as Kolya and Lev are, it was hard not to sympathize with their desperate quest to find meaning in spite of the war and even beyond it. Death stalks them, and if they fell from the frying pan into the fire with their temporary reprieve from justice, each step seems to take them deeper into the fire. Almost no scene passes where the threat doesn’t rear its head, whether it is cannibals, Nazis, snipers, or starvation. It is a world that Thomas Hobbes would easily recognize and describe as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Yet, in spite of the horror of this “war of all against all,” Kolya and Lev represent the beauty that human nature can find and create at the darkest of times. Kolya is the lettered intellectual–or so he wants to be–while Lev is the son of a poet, dead and denounced to the state by small-minded rivals, jealous of his art. Together, they trek across starving Leningrad and into the frozen countryside where Nazi death squads await. Their language fluctuates between extremities of vulgarity and poetry, the wondering words of two boys at once confident and adrift in a dangerous world.

I hesitate to share much more, because I don’t want to spoil the story. Benioff’s City of Thieves: A Novel is often funny, frequently clever, and occasionally vulgar, but it is cast with characters that feel real and sympathetic, even in their worst moments, and their story is beautiful as it is tragic.

Overall Rating: 

Parent’s guide: This is not a book for children…probably not teens, either, at least not without parental guidance and discussion.

• Sex: Frequent and prolific discussion, in vulgar terms and description, between the main characters about sex. Reference to rape by Nazis.
• Violence: Some shooting, cannabalism, several scenes of bloodshed, and fighting. Description of torture.
• Language: Frequent. More than any other book I can remember.