David benioff book6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Episode after episode sounds like a folk tale: the cannibals are giants with clubs, for instance. Lev and Kolya, thrown together by chance, are sent off on a lunatic mission - to find a dozen eggs by a certain deadline, or face certain death. Benioff structures City of Thieves as a kind of picaresque narrative. The challenge, writing a book like this, must be how to present the horror in a way that readers can take in. “This is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. Escaping narrowly, they discuss their luck. ![]() Later on, when Lev has acquired his improbable friend Kolya, the handsome blonde army officer, the two encounter a pair of cannibals who come close to turning them into meat patties. I said it with authority because I knew it was true and I had no way to prove it.” They speculate about the cause of his death: “‘He froze to death,’ I told them. ![]() He and two friends, on fire-watching duty, find a dead German officer floating toward them in the night sky. The narrator is the grandfather, Lev Beniov, a seventeen-year-old Jewish virgin, burdened by self-doubt. But he also tips us off very early that his book is also about story-telling. David Benioff frames City of Thieves as his grandfather’s story of survival during the Siege of Leningrad, and it may be that. ![]()
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