Under Siege

I don’t eat meat, but I have my own trick for making my Thanksgiving meal savory: a book about hunger. Nothing depressing. No emaciated Ethiopians, concentration camps, or sepia photos of dour-faced Oklahomans creeping in their rusty lorries through dusty fields. Instead, I sought solace and well-being in Daniel Bentioff’s, “City of Thieves,” a work of fiction that pretends to be semi-nonfiction but ultimately gets dragged down by the unbearable weight of its sappy artifice.

The book is a quick and engaging read, which helps explain its longstanding perch on bestseller lists and conspicuous ubiquity at bookstores nationwide. The story is set in Leningrad in the waning days of World War II, when the city is under siege and its residents are starving. The narrative is carried by the fictional author’s grandpa, a former solider who had settled in America in the decades after the told escapades. We thus know, right off the bat, that the hero, Lev, will make it -- a no small matter given the number of bullets flying toward him over those 200-plus pages.

The grandson narrator freely acknowledges that, as a writer, he has taken some liberties with Lev’s story. But by the time the story ends, it becomes clear that this is a colossal understatement. The plot is delightfully absurd. Lev gets caught looting a corpse and faces imprisonment or worse. As he is detained, he meets another man in a similar predicament, a muscular, sex-crazed, salty-tongued companion named Kolya. The odd couple has an unusual assignment -- find a dozen eggs and deliver them to a Soviet colonel, who needs the eggs for a wedding cake for his daughter. So far so good. But what begins as a bleak but brisk-paced tale full of dark-humored naturalism gets bogged down in fake pathos and over-the-top action. The comically absurd becomes the painfully absurd as Bentioff, scraps emotional honesty in favor of fake pathos and over-the-top action scenes that would be better placed in Tarantino movie than in a book of historical fiction. The pages turn quickly but the book disappointedly devolves into action-packed melodrama -- a “Water for Elephants” with testicles.

 Sure, there are plenty of smiles and tears to complement the bullets and grenades, but the laughs are generally triggered dirty jokes and the tears are those of melodrama. But the lingering feeling after the final page is one of frustration and disappointment at the wasted opportunity. Bentioff is a Hollywood screenwriter, not a historian, which explains why “City of Thieves” is the way it is. He is a gifted and engaging storyteller, which helps explain the book’s success and which makes it a fine airplane companion. Unfortunately, a reader hungry for a meatier, weightier war story, with emotional honesty and  fare should scour elsewhere.