(He should in no way be mistaken for the real-life Benioff, who writes screenplays as well as fiction and whose film credits include “Troy” and “The Kite Runner.”) The narrator’s Russian-born grandfather, on the other hand, has some tantalizing stories about World War II. “I realized I had led an intensely dull life,” writes this preliminary narrator, who’s in his mid-30s. screenwriter named David has little to say for himself when asked to contribute an autobiographical essay to a trade magazine. In the prologue, it’s the present day, and an L.A. Most likely this was not the transporting outcome the author had anticipated.Įven before that first chapter, Benioff delivers the framing device that begins the process of distancing his audience. Instead, I remained in my sunny kitchen in the Valley with a nice plate of hummus. “You have never been so hungry you have never been so cold,” reads the opening line of Chapter 1, and believe me, I was ready to share all the epic wartime fear and wretchedness that Benioff has to offer, was keen to sneak behind enemy lines through frostbitten Soviet woods along with Lev, the book’s teenage narrator. How is it possible, then, that “City of Thieves” left me so thoroughly and discouragingly unmoved? Really, everything a reader could hope for in a buddy story set during the German army’s siege of Leningrad during World War II. It imagines the absurdities and horrors endured by people caught in one of history’s most lethal moments. DAVID BENIOFF’S second novel (after “The 25th Hour,” which Spike Lee directed for the screen) features a snappy plot, a buoyant friendship, a quirky courtship, an assortment of menacing bad guys, an atmosphere that flickers between grainy realism and fairy-tale grotesquerie and a grim but irrepressible sense of humor.
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