What is #100books ?- I wanted to share the details of some really amazing books that I read. They need not always be the typical bestsellers. I accidentally “discovered” most of them – some in airport stores of different countries, some in friends’ old hard disks and some are new releases. So, sharing the awesomeness.
A local book store owner recommended this book when I was about to put it back down in the store after browsing through the cover.
What I remember the most while reading this book is how I felt the ebbs and flows of feeling the comedy and tragedy. It has the recipe of a typical best-selling historical fiction book – protagonists Kolya & Lev, his romantic interest Vika, and a so-called villain but it’s not primarily their story. The book is the story of Russia through the characters’ eyes, about the sieze of Leningrad by Nazis during world-war II that killed more than 3 million people.
The protagonist Lev is a 17 year old Jewish boy, son of a poet who was killed by Russian government and who knows about drawbacks too well but still longs for something beyond what reality tells him.
“This wasn’t the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn’t.” – Lev
While Kolya is a seemingly carefree character and Lev’s companion in an unusual adventure. He brags (to Lev’s annoyance) about his interests and skills which are literature, women and his fighting.
“Kolya considered himself a bit of a bohemian, a free thinker, but in his own way he was as much a true believer as any Young Pioneer. The worst part about it was that I didn’t think he was wrong.”
And these two characters were my window to understanding a bit of what Russia went through during WWII. Author David Benioff did his research from the book 900 days to keep the setting close to reality of the 900 day sieze of Leningrad. A constant thought for me while reading the book was about the preciousness of life for a human being, what thoughts would come to a person’s mind when they and everyone around them are being killed so easily just like an insect. And the fact that the setting in this historical fiction story is mostly non-fiction made it even more heart-breaking to read. When I read the stories of people struggling to survive, eventually most dying of starvation, resorting to cannibalism and worse, watching all of their loved ones die while waiting for death – it was a grim reminder of Darwin’s survival of the fittest.
But when you are done with the book, you will feel and remember the hope and defiance of the characters to survive and to do something right by their country. At the end, you can’t help but feel the sadness that these fictional characters felt and admire this amazing city of Leningrad and its people for real.
balladofnature 