Intense.

I’ve read books that are set during sad and difficult times and there are usually a few heartwarming pockets of relief. But this story is just hunger, cold and decay of a city and its people.

It lacks in historical insight as the story is told through the eyes of someone who has no knowledge of military strategy, but it does have a little character development.

It’s a very sad and depressing tale, almost gratuitously in parts. But it is written well and leaves you hanging on just to find out if it ends well.

But it is a tale that is well researched and very well told.

For anyone interested the experience of the residents of Leningrad during WWII this is a great way to understand the extreme conditions of starvation and cold that killed off half the city's population in the winter of 1941, while the invading German army cut of all the supply lines to the city. If you have been to Leningrad/St Petersburg, as I did in the late 1980s, you will recognise that the atmosphere and mood is captured superbly in the descriptions of the people and places. The deterioration of both is described in vivid, poetic but completely unsentimental language by the author. The fact that life became an obsessive, seemingly endless battle for rationed food and fuel is captured perfectly by one of the best passages in the book, which includes: "Ration cards are not like gold: they are so far above gold that you can’t even make the comparison." All this is described through the experiences of one small household led by character, Anna, who in her early 20s, becomes prematurely aged as her body withers, like everyone around her, but "chooses to live" and stays compassionate through to the end.

I was hoping for more. It is a fairly easy and short read but I didn't really like the style and I found it quite dull. Of course the subject matter is depressing and I think told in a way that echoed that. Lots of short heavy sentences and stilted dialogue that lent to the air of cold and hunger but I never really felt engaged with the characters. Perhaps for me the city itself as a character was sadly missing and the characters could have really been anywhere. Of course there really is no plot, no reveal, no surprises - not even really an ending = just a narrative about an odd "family" trying to survive in terrible circumstances. There were moments when it moved me and it does make you reflect on suffering and death but there was little to no movement from start to finish and I found it quite lacking in emotion. It's not a bad read but I was really hoping for more and it didn't deliver.

Gripping historical drama about the siege of Leningrad. Not classic but very well done

World War II had a lot of crazy stories, but the Siege of Leningrad has to be one of the craziest ones of all. Instead of invading the city, the Nazis decided to surround the city of Leningrad and allow it to destroy itself. The premise of which inspired one of my favourite books of all time, City of Thieves by David Benioff. So when I heard about this book by Helen Dunmore, I wanted to read more.

Unfortunately, I don't think Dunmore brings a lot more to the table here. Going into the story, you know that it is going to be a cast of characters feeling hungry all the time, and the lengths to which they go to satiated that hunger — and you do get a whole lot of that. From boiling leather to peeling glue off of wallpaper, the characters go through a lot just to feel a tiny bit less hungry. Cold, too, is a real enemy, with temperatures plunging to 20 degrees below zero in some of the worst winters in Russian history.

Now, with that said, that is about all that you are going to get out of this book. First off, I dislike the way Dunmore strays away from the main cast of characters from time to time. You are introduced to the protagonist and her family at the beginning of the book, and the story is largely told from her perspective. However, without warning, you are given a dozen pages told from the perspective of a random neighbour, or a friend at work, or a general who's supposed to take care of food and supplies going in and out of the city. What is worse is that these side characters remain as cameos, so there's this constant schizophrenic structure to the story.

I also dislike how Dunmore doesn't give time for the crisis to sink in. In one chapter, everything is fine and dandy, then in the next chapter everybody is eating rotten bread and cabbage soup. Halfway through the book, just a month or two into the siege, and she's hinting at cannibalism and human meat being sold on the streets. Not to say that that did not happen in real life, but Dunmore doesn't seem to know how to build a sense of crisis and dread. The city descends into chaos in mere pages, as if she cannot wait to get to the end — and what a rushed ending, too. In one chapter, someone passes away in the family and, in the next chapter, winter has passed and everybody is strolling the streets again. Everything just feels very insular and narrow in this book, and I feel like everything is happening to this family and this family only. You hardly know what's happening to her neighbours, to the rest of the city, and what's happening with the Nazis. The perspective is strictly on the family and the family alone.

It also bothers me that the timeline is never properly fleshed out. I mean, the actual siege began in September 1941, and the characters have to survive the upcoming winter. However, by the end of the book, it is spring again and the winter is thawing, and even though half the city died, the other half resume their day-to-day lives — but what about the siege? What about the Nazis? What about the actual war that's going on? Historically, the siege actually lasted for more than two years, so what about the rest of the time? Do they survive the rest of the siege? It's all very wishy-washy, hand wavy to me.

At the end of the day, it is a readable book, but you are not going to find out more about the Siege of Leningrad than you already have. If you want a book that actually gives the premise a special yet harrowing twist, read the aforementioned City of Thieves by David Benioff.

3.5/5

Now we know that they don't just want to defeat us. They want to destroy us. Nothing in Leningrad matters to them at all. Not a stone, or a child. Carthage must be destroyed.
But there's freedom in knowing it. We can't make deals with them any more. So much for our pact. We have no choice left. We have to resist.

It's a heroic struggle, of course it is. Everything's heroic. You can take that for granted, but it's not the point.

I may lower the rating for this some time in the future. It acts on a principle similar to that of 'Fugitive Pieces' and various other works that take on monumentally tragic events of history with especially pretty prose or clever philosophizings. It's not as if such subjects have to be treated with a no-nonsense approach on the level of narratology, but such an overemphasized aesthetic can interfere with a reader's own engagement with the piece, much as a sad scene in a movie can be turned ridiculous by too swelling an orchestral accompaniment in the background. Reading this in the wake of at least one work that unsuccessfully attempted to do this with the Holocaust, I've become aware of my own bias in the matter, so when it comes to this work that managed to slip by my otherwise cynical defenses with the right rhythm, word choice, and pacing, shouldn't I be as strict with it as I was with others (especially when this work isn't coming to me through translation)? Were it not for the writing, would I have been more critical of the odd flatness that comes from the noble/evil character dichotomy, or the British inflections that jarringly reminded one of where this story was actually coming from? Hard to say, but then again, what is a tale if not its writing?

The history of Leningrad, Petrograd, St Petersburg may stretch back to the moment Peter put his iron mark on the marshes of the Neva, but you can't eat history.

So here we are in the middle of nowhere, in the path of the German advance, equipped with entrenching tools instead of the machine-guns and rifles we need, but still arguing about the martyr status of the Decembrists' wives. Nothing, to me, more effectively sums up both our strength and our weakness.

While I haven't read many books of Russian history and even fewer on the siege of Leningrad, I've enough under my belt to be able to see the difference between a script translated direct from the people's source and the one that, ultimately, is cobbled together from notes, pictures, and experiences that will forever be drawn fifth or sixth hand on a cultural level, if that. Now, Dunmore names Ginzburg's [b:Journey into the Whirlwind|71149|Journey into the Whirlwind|Evgenia Ginzburg|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328876430l/71149._SY75_.jpg|68902] and its sequel as one of her sources, and I can see that shining through especially in the quote above. Still, as horribly as she draws the build up and break down of the German's march on Russia in WWII, it still comes off as oddly sanitized in many places. Even on a fictional level, it would hardly fit in to the written timeline of the country between Goldman's [b:Living My Life|51695|Living My Life|Emma Goldman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309282997l/51695._SY75_.jpg|28303] (the unabridged Vol II, mind you) and Alexievich's [b:Secondhand Time|30200112|Secondhand Time The Last of the Soviets|Svetlana Alexievich|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463438551l/30200112._SY75_.jpg|27225929] for reasons I cannot adequately define even to my own levels of satisfaction. As one can tell from the numerous quantity of quotes I've chosen to include, this was certainly a pleasurable read on the simple level of first word's glance, but the fact that I already have the sequel on my shelves is the result of past levels of interest, not present ones. Would it have helped had the characters been less uniform or the plot been less straightforward in its tragedy, despite my usually not paying much attention to either, or did this need more causal meanderings that tried to take on eternity in addition to this period of time in Leningrad in its determinations of which truths have worth and which do not? I can think of any number of works whose attempts at any of these methods have miserably backfired, so, all I can say is, while I enjoyed this on its surface level, I know I'd derive far more holistic engagement out of reading the works it lists as its sources.

The problem is that when so many are dying, the death penalty loses its edge.

You have a certain idea of yourself: what you'll do, and what you won't do. It's hard enough to hold on to it.

This review is basically 'I liked it, but are the reasons for why I liked it good enough,' which is so pointlessly exhausting that I should stop while I'm still ahead. The work isn't something that I see sustaining itself in the future, but it serves as an introduction to this period of Russian history to someone who's not ready to venture in the world of translation and/or nonfiction. It's tragic alright, but oddly unmoored from the reality it springs from; it's not as if I expected the characters to be arguing politics or quoting poets every two seconds, but there was just something missing from the Soviet view that I've picked up glimpses of in various nonfictional tracts. Not the weakest book award nominee that I've read, but it does show the marks of having been tailored as such, which also isn't helped by the fact that this could very well be shelved with the young adult works in the author's repertoire were it not for a few sexually explicit discussions of the human body. An easy enough read then with some noteworthy turns of phrase, but there are many more works that render the subject material better, and this would have done more for me back when I first added it nearly a decade ago then it does now.

From every row of wooden houses, from every apartment building, shop, museum, library, factory, hospital, orphanage, school, the corpses of winter have now been removed, leaving empty, sunlit apartments, unswept doorsteps, classes without their teachers, teachers with classes of ten children instead of thirty, empty seats at library desks, shops that don't open, poems that will not be written, operations that will fail to be performed, and little boats that will not, this season, be uncovered, repainted, and launched from shallow sandy shores on to the waters of the Baltic.