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    Hunger
    Hunger
    Hunger
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Hunger

    By Elise Blackwell

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUnbridled Books
    Release dateApr 1, 2008
    ISBN9781936071333
    Hunger

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    Reviews for Hunger

    3.5/5

    5 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A slim volume of impressive power and beauty. A botanist suffers through the "hunger winter" of the seige of Leningrad and survives...but only by sacrificing his values and his allegiance to his work. Based on a real historical event, "Hunger" plumbs the depth of guilt and explores the possibility of redemption.
    • 4/5
      Hunger is a short novel, but one that has a powerful voice to tackle issues of history, life at the edge of survival, and what happens to ethical and intelligent people when the things they care about are torn asunder. Set during the Siege of Leningrad from 1941-1944, the book focuses on issues of survival that go beyond the immediate needs of the protagonists themselves, ultimately leading to ruminations on betrayal, duplicity, and what it really means to be a moral person. Given the short length, the narrative is tight and relatively fast-paced, leaving the reader to fill in some of the blanks. But that's all to the good - Elise Blackwell does indeed manage to turn her story into something of a mirror, asking the reader to reflect on what they might do in similarly extreme situations. A solid piece of literature all around.
    • 2/5
      So, this book was okay. Beautiful writing but once I finished I just kind of forgot about it. I didn't dwell on it like one should with a book like this. Plus, though I know that it was the point, I just could not stand the narrator.
    • 5/5
      This book is not about hunger, unless the hunger you think of is the hunger of a soul for forgiveness. Indeed, there is a great deal about food hunger in this book as it takes place during the "hunger winter" in 1941 in Leningrad. If I ever learned of this event in Russian history, it faded from memory. I can't imagine what the suffering was like. There is one line I have copied to my reading pillow (a small pyramid shaped pillow made of plain muslin that I write quotes all over).She was a woman who cared more about what she was right about than about being right. That I knew about her, though I could not claim to understand her. Even now, I cannot claim to have understood her. (page 121)There is also a bit about Voltaire's Candide about gardens that reminds me I want to someday read the book, but also that I need to understand gardening. And then there is the book's format...slender in pages and width. Slender but not sparse. Not like the people who lived through the hunger winter, or the memory that still lives.
    • 4/5
      "Voltaire got it right in Candide, I believe: a bit of decency and the physical labor and small rewards of cultivating a garden from seed are the best we can strive or hope for to dull the pain of lost expectation, or to cover our vices of weakness, boredom and need"A retelling of the great hunger in Leningrad in 1941 is particularly poignant as the world faces severe food shortages and the United Nations call for an international response. It is a reminder of the pain and horror and de-humanizing effect of hunger. Will the scientists preserve the precious seeds for their nation or will they, like the main character, give in to tempation and in the end does it really matter? This is a lovely short read but I wondered why the main character's sex life seemed to be as important as his struggle with hunger? Perhaps it was as important to him, it just doesn't seem very likely to me nor is it likely that starving women kept throwing themselves at his feet.Having reflected on that last statement I think I withdraw it as a criticism. It is rather a part of the author's careful crafting of this character, and we can jump up at any point and yell selfish for any number of reasons. The author actually points out through her character that hunger does not generally bring out the best in people. It is an aching primal pain and though short, this story brings it to life. The pacing is lovely, and the memories of previous trips collecting seeds for wonderful plants and delicious food is a vivid contrast to the starvation in Leningrad. The richness and variety of melons in South America, for example, is lovingly described and I remembered being in Ecuador in 2000 and being stunned by exactly the same thing, melons and fruit I had never seen before, beautiful and ripened on the vine. Then we are back in Leningrad.A great first novel by a very accomplished writer.
    • 4/5
      It's not until you finish this story and think about it for a while that it hits you what it was all really about. When a novel can do that, then it's a good one -- and this novel will probably have me thinking for a while. The story is told from the perspective of an elderly man, looking out his window in an apartment in New York. The man, whose name I don't believe was ever mentioned, is reliving a horrible time in history: the siege of Leningrad (the modern city of St. Petersburg), which lasted nearly three years from 1941 to 1944. During the first year, after the Nazis had blockaded all but one route in and out of the city, and because nothing of this sort had ever happened before, and people were unprepared, thousands froze and starved to death because of the lack of any way to leave. This is the backdrop of the novel; the story is about a group of scientists who worked in a genetics laboratory under the directorship of Nikolai I. Vavilov. As the time of starvation set in, Vavilov & his assistants made a pact to preserve the hundreds of thousands of seeds that they had gathered from all over the world, no matter what happened. Many of them starved to death surrounded by these seeds, but the story is told by one man who focused on survival and doing what he felt had to be done in order to live.The story also draws interesting parallels between ancient Babylon and Leningrad during the siege -- read these parts very carefully because they also highlight, as the author notes, "what does and does not change about human life with changing leaders and gods -- and on the tragedies of mighty civilizations." (from the book, Reading Group Guide)I really enjoyed this book and I definitely recommend it. No one ever knows what they would or would not do in desperate times and desperate situations - and this book really brings that point across. An excellent story.

    Book preview

    Hunger - Elise Blackwell

    For David and Esme

    We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

    Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. . . . And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

    — Paul Valéry

    You may have noticed the bush that it pushes to air,

    Comical-delicate, sometimes with second-rate flowers

    Awkward and milky and beautiful only to hunger.

    — Richard Wilbur, from Potato

    Hunger

    The celebrated biologist Nikolai Vavilov collected hundreds of thousands of seed and plant specimens from around the world, housing them at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. Vavilov became a victim of the antigenetics campaign waged by Trofim Lysenko, who gradually gained control of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. Vavilov died in prison in 1942 or 1943 of some combination of maltreatment and starvation. Many of his associates and staff were imprisoned, exiled, sent to work on collective farms, or dismissed. During the siege of Leningrad, those who remained protected Vavilov’s collections from rats, from human intruders, and from themselves. What follows is a fictional account of such a time and place. The characters are inventions and are in no way based on the courageous people who worked at what today is called the Vavilov Institute.

    It is not so uncommon for those near the end of their lives to run their mind’s hand over the contours of those lives. Perhaps that is all that I do here as I reach across the populated spaces of time, geography, and language, reach from a comfortable New York apartment to a city once and again called Saint Petersburg.

    •   •   •

    The anniversary of our wedding day fell on the last of the early summer’s white nights, and I could still believe that we would be fine. We dined at a restaurant that had been better a few years earlier but was still very good. Our window overlooked the Neva. The Peter and Paul Fortress lifted from the center of the river. Its bastion tilted slightly over the water, seeming more precarious than fortified, pointing askew to a sky more bright than light, a sky the creamy white color of the anona tree’s sweet custard apple.

    Alena’s voice floated lighter on the air than it had in a year, and we ate well, sucking the delicate saltiness from the leg casings of huge crabs, spooning caviar directly into our mouths and sliding it down our throats with a white-grape wine that was just too sweet but good nonetheless.

    I kept the check from Alena. She believed that the loss of her salary and the approach of Hitlerite Germany’s young soldiers meant that we should hold tight to our money. Like the smell of rain before drops hit the skin, the coming war told me to spend, to have whatever I could now, before it could no longer be had. It would be later that I would learn to hoard crumbs like a miser.

    I desired to go straight home and make love to the only woman I was allowing myself, the only one I really wanted. But Alena had heard on the radio the poet Vera Inber, whose account of the long days and nights ahead would secure her fame and favor, and wished to attend a reading she was giving.

    We walked along Nevsky Prospect, which had widened with the crowds out to enjoy the last night of the year when the sun would go to the horizon but no lower. I held Alena close, by her arm, and then closer, my arm around her waist.

    Every fabricated thing in Leningrad, from the antique ornaments atop monument gates to the nouveau wire poles, pointed upward, elegant, futile.

    The small hall where the reading was held was full and very hot and smoky, something I would savor often in memory but did not enjoy at the time.

    I remember few of Vera Inber’s words. But those of the reputationless poet who preceded her have remained long with me. Tall and sturdy, he had been a sailor before he seized a pen. He appeared hale on first glance, but the gray folded into his face and the depth and yellow of his eyes gave away some disease of the internal organs.

    He read several poems, none of them particularly to my taste, in a strong voice that was decidedly more naval than poetic. The last is the one I remember. It was called The Shipwreck Survivor. I offer it now to begin my own story.

    I never saw the poem on paper, so I do not know how the sailor-turned-poet broke his lines. But I recall each word as spoken:

    The ones who drown never change the facts, but those who survive the sea in their lungs must send their stories on words, words like small leaky boats, across the distance, cold, and currents of that water.

    •   •   •

    The volunteers of the opolchenia, including my Alena but not myself, scurried like rodents. Shelters appeared, and trenches. Young women pierced their skin wrapping barbed wire around obstacles built to prevent tanks from penetrating the city. We all waited for the attack and prepared to defend our city block by block, building by building, hand to hand.

    But the tanks never rolled in. They stopped outside the city, and how much simpler it would have been had they kept coming.

    •   •   •

    In early September, the first Hitlerite shells descended — graceful and even hesitant from their high loft. Then Junkers rose and fell, rose and fell, leaving behind deposits of incendiaries like so much fatal silt.

    When they hit the Badayev warehouses, the cramped lines of wooden buildings burned fast, and the fats stored within their boards radiated red heat, turning the close sky to embers and filling the air like summer cooking.

    What did not burn were a few thousand tons of sugar, which instead melted through the floor planks to survive, shaped and imprinted by the cellars, as a hard candy. This candy was broken into chips that would be prized and sold for money and sex in the months that followed.

    But so much would be passed off and paid for as food.

    •   •   •

    Among the many thousands of specimens housed at the institute were several hundred tubers. Small and large. Smooth and warty. White, brown, yellow, purple, and blue. Lidia, my longtime sometime lover, had helped collect the blue potatoes on an expedition to Ecuador and Peru. I had, against my preference, stayed in Leningrad with Alena.

    Lidia collected more than the institute needed, and when she returned, we spent an afternoon in her apartment, peeling, cutting, frying, and feeding the blue chips to each other, licking salt and oil from each other’s fingers and

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