Hunger
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Scouring the world’s most remote fields and valleys, a dedicated Soviet scientist has spent his life collecting rare plants for his country’s premiere botanical institute in Leningrad. From Northern Africa to Afghanistan, from South America to Abyssinia, he has sought and saved seeds that could be traced back to the most ancient civilizations. And the adventure has set deep in him. Even at home with the wife he loves, the memories of his travels return him to the beautiful women and strange foods he has known in exotic regions.
When German troops surround Leningrad in the fall of 1941, he becomes a captive in the siege. As food supplies dwindle, residents eat the bark of trees, barter all they own for flour, and trade sex for food. In the darkest winter hours of the siege, the institute’s scientists make a pact to leave untouched the precious storehouse of seeds that they believe is the country’s future. But such a promise becomes difficult to keep when hunger is grows undeniable.
Based on true events from World War II, Hunger is a private story about a man wrestling with his own morality. This beautiful debut novel ask us what is the meaning of integrity
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An elderly Russian migr reminisces about love in the shadow of war in this quietly effective, poignant debut. The opening chapters find the anonymous narrator ensconced in his New York apartment, waxing poetic about his life as a botanist during the siege of Leningrad, as he and his colleagues struggle to save the city's rare collection of plants in the botanical gardens. Deeply in love with his wife, Alena, another botanist, the narrator nonetheless embarks on a series of affairs, with a fellow worker named Lidia and with sexy, exotic Iskra. Both affairs become more difficult and tortured as the siege progresses and the city's population begins to starve. Blackwell wisely steers clear of the horrors that have been chronicled in many previous historical novels. Instead, she offers gemlike observations ("With Alena, who needed neither to find nor to lose herself, sex was only sex") and sensory detail ("one fat, perfect potato in salted water"). The juxtaposition of the gnawing torment of starvation with the narrator's memory of the exotic foods he collected and ate on his travels around the world before the war furnish the novel with many of its tensions and delights. Plotwise, there are some intriguing twists and turns as the war progresses, but the climax is rather tepid, with Blackwell underplaying her narrator's unusual and immoral survival tactics as food becomes increasingly scarce. Still, this is a well-crafted novel that works largely because of its small, evocative moments.
