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Summary
Summary
Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist's life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a robust life of the mind, withers in spirit and body. At such brutal times everything is tested. And yet Dunmore's inspiring story shows that even then, the triumph of the human heart is that love need not fall away. "The novel's imaginative richness," writes The Washington Post, "lies in this implicit question: In dire physical circumstances, is it possible to have an inner life? The answer seems to be that no survival is possible without one." Amid the turmoil of the siege, the unimaginable happens -- two people enter the Levins' frozen home and bring a kind of romance where before there was only bare survival. A sensitive young doctor becomes Anna's devoted partner, and her father is allowed a transcendent final episode with a mysterious woman from his past. The Siege marks an exciting new phase in a brilliant career, observed Publishers Weekly in a starred review: "Dunmore has built a sizable audience ... but this book should lift her to another level of literary prominence." "Dunmore's ... novel ... is an intimate record of an extraordinary human disaster ... a moving story of personal triumph and public tragedy." -- Laura Ciolkowski, San Francisco Chronicle "In Helen Dunmore's hands, this epic subject assumes a lyrical honesty that sometimes wrenches but more often lifts the spirit." -- Frances Taliaferro, The Washington Post "Dunmore unravels the tangle of suffering, war, and base emotions to produce a story woven with love ... Extraordinary." -- Barbara Conaty, Library Journal (starred review)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a novel whose every observation is so sharp the words almost hurt, Dunmore (Talking to the Dead) takes a giant step away from her praised domestic psychological dramas set in England. This urgent narrative brings shocking news, although the events Dunmore chronicles took place six decades ago, and mirror ancient, universal struggles. It's 1941; Leningrad is under siege by the German army and the relentless winter. Thousands will starve or freeze before the spring, but Dunmore shuns the moral numbness of numbers. She compels us to live inside the skin of Anna Levin, a 23-year-old artist and nursery-schoolteacher. In chaste yet shimmering prose, Dunmore conveys the sourness of Anna's hunger, her anguish over whether to eat an onion immediately or save it to sprout so that her five-year-old brother, Kolya, may have the precious vitamins in the shoots. Anna's mother died when Kolya was born, and Anna must also feed her ailing father, the writer Mikhail, who has fallen out of favor with the government. As winter closes in, his one-time mistress, the faded, gallant actress, Marina, joins their household, bringing her precious hoard of cloudberry jam. Andrei, a physician who loves Anna, stumbles home from brutal days at the hospital to help huddle Kolya against the interminable icy nights. Lauded by the British critics last year, the novel is a signal achievement, and Anna is a true heroine for our times - tender in love, passionate in art, unyielding in her will to survive. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Love in a time of war, siege, starvation, cannibalism . . . these are rich topics, perhaps too rich. The publisher's blurb for Helen Dunmore's seventh novel, set in Leningrad in 1941 during the first year of the German blockade, made me immediately question her taste. A city that Hitler intended to starve into submission is hardly the place for Anna and Andrei, a 20th-century Pierre and Natasha, to fall into passionate embraces. In fact, Dunmore's ambitions are not as broad as Tolstoy's in either historical scope or emotional intensity. The Siege , with its tight domestic focus, is resolutely no War and Peace (nor, thankfully, no romantic melodrama). Like all Dunmore's fiction, it is delicately evocative and immensely readable; yet, after polishing it off in three or four enjoyable sittings, I still found it in some primary way indigestible. We first come across Anna Levin, a Leningrad nursery-school assistant and the novel's central character, one June evening. She is at the family dacha, planting potatoes, onions and cabbage. With a poet's economy, Dunmore sketches in not only the death of Anna's mother and her maternal duties to her small brother Kolya, but also the political culture of Stalin's Soviet Union. Before Anna has so much as sown the radishes, we also know that her father Mikhail, a writer, has fallen foul of the Writer's Union, and that Anna's own ideological mettle is considered suspect by the rigidly orthodox head of her nursery. If Dunmore's slight references touch off historical sparks, then the reason for her brevity is immediately apparent. As Anna sets off to visit an old flame of her father's, Marina Petrovna - an actress now living out in the country to escape further denunciation from the authorities - we know that by the time she returns, this image of tranquillity will be shattered. This is no ordinary June evening; it is the eve of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Anna won't be going back to harvest her vegetable plot. Historical events aside, readers familiar with Dunmore's fiction will detect other inevitabilities. Here is a family unit, not four- square but pulled into an awkward rectangle by the absence of a mother, the nurturing role thrust upon Anna, and the introduction of Marina Petrovna. This probing of relationships gives a much-needed dimension independent of the brutal facts of the family's survival. Anna, a talented but untrained artist, has been summoned to sketch Marina. As she puts pencil to paper, she is forced to look hard at the woman who disturbed her childhood. And when Marina moves into the Levins' Leningrad apartment that autumn, Anna comes to understand the complexity of adult relationships. Dunmore has used such unconventional arrangements before to track the dynamics of familial love. This young, intelligent but untested heroine, half-hidden behind her sketchpad, recalls the young girl at the centre of Dunmore's debut, Zennor in Darkness , who observes, and also sketches, D H Lawrence and his German lover, Frieda, sitting out the first world war in a Cornish cottage. In many ways, the material facts of the Leningrad blockade complement Dunmore's style of writing: the emotional trajectories of her characters fall neatly within her narrative of the first year of the siege. Anna, back from the dacha, is sent to dig tank traps on the outskirts of the city. In her work battalion she is sandwiched between Evgenia - an earthy worker, cynical enough about the power of the party high-ups but sensible about whom she shares her remarks with - and Katya, a dreamy child of the intelligentsia whose hands will never toughen up. Anna is the bridge between the two, accepting Evgenia's rough humour and her advice, but still able to sympathise with Katya's daydreams of dresses and walks along Nevsky Prospect. Meanwhile, Mikhail is sent to the front in a barely equipped People's Volunteers unit. There he meets Andrei, a medical student. Mikhail begins his siege journal, allowing Dunmore to offload the military background to the war, while Andrei, who treats the wounded and later the malnourished, provides the medical dimension. More importantly, a relationship develops between Andrei and Anna. Here Dunmore treads carefully and cleverly. On their second meeting, Dunmore shows Anna washing herself with the last sliver of Marina's jasmine soap, but the contours of their growing romance are not to be traced in perfume. As the winter cold bites and the bread ration is cut, Andrei explains the effects of hunger on the body's responses. Anna can offer Andrei only hot-water "tea", and when they share a bed it is a practical gesture: the two huddle close, with Kolya between them, to keep warm and to stay alive. As the German noose pulls tighter, the Levins' world gradually closes in until it is concentrated on their apartment, the contents of the store cupboard, the stove, and Anna's dangerous forays to collect their bread ration or to forage for wood among the city's bombed-out buildings. Dunmore is at ease when her focus is forced ever more sharply on the domestic interior. She has always written superbly about food, the mundanities of its preparation and its emotional role, and in The Siege it is, naturally, the vital centre of the narrative. Anna does return to the dacha to harvest her vegetables, creeping out into the no man's land between the Soviet and German frontline. Unable to fit much on her bicycle, she tramps down the rest so that the German army cannot eat her crops. When Marina and Anna boil up a pigskin manicure case with the wallpaper paste from Kolya's toy fort to make "soup", the reader is pulled back to the homemade jam Marina offers Anna on their first meeting, and the trout Mikhail and Kolya cook on her return. Their hunger gives Anna and Marina's dreamy backward-looking reflections an almost physical plausibility. However, the content of their reflections and histories have, on occasion, too familiar a ring. Anna's complaints about the "double burden" of her job and domestic responsibilities - the litany of the trudge from house, to work, to food queue and home - comes from Natalya Baranskaya's A Week Like Any Other . Lydia Ginzburg's Notes of a Blockade Survivor are also apparent, while Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs give Marina and Mikhail, archetypal members of the post- revolution intelligentsia, their depth. Dunmore freely acknowledges her sources, and any writer, Russian or not, would be foolish to ignore such rich wells of material on Stalin's Russia. But for anyone reasonably familiar with the period, the bones sometimes protrude too sharply. The same is true of Dunmore's Leningrad: a quote from the opening stanza of Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" is inevitable. The motif of an unnatural city that stands on the bones of its builders is as expected as Paris in the spring. Dunmore may be following a literary tradition of personifying the city begun by Pushkin, but she imitates rather than develops the theme. This sense that Dunmore has borrowed rather than truly inhabited the history that The Siege makes use of is never really dispersed. Her characters' inner lives and relationships have undoubted emotional truth, but when they have to interact with real places and events, they fall into expected patterns. We know what Anna will have to do to survive, what deprivations she will endure, because we have read the same histories as Dunmore. We also know from the guidebooks and the memoirs how she will respond to her native city and to the political culture she lives in. Leningrad/St Petersburg's rich and often horrific 20th century offers tempting material for any novelist, and the blockade is undoubtedly one of its darkest periods. But it is questionable whether The Siege is equal to that depth, or ever probes beyond its obvious paths. Caption: article-dunmore.1 [Anna Levin], a talented but untrained artist, has been summoned to sketch Marina. As she puts pencil to paper, she is forced to look hard at the woman who disturbed her childhood. And when Marina moves into the Levins' Leningrad apartment that autumn, Anna comes to understand the complexity of adult relationships. [Helen Dunmore] has used such unconventional arrangements before to track the dynamics of familial love. This young, intelligent but untested heroine, half-hidden behind her sketchpad, recalls the young girl at the centre of Dunmore's debut, Zennor in Darkness , who observes, and also sketches, D H Lawrence and his German lover, Frieda, sitting out the first world war in a Cornish cottage. More importantly, a relationship develops between [Andrei] and Anna. Here Dunmore treads carefully and cleverly. On their second meeting, Dunmore shows Anna washing herself with the last sliver of Marina's jasmine soap, but the contours of their growing romance are not to be traced in perfume. As the winter cold bites and the bread ration is cut, Andrei explains the effects of hunger on the body's responses. Anna can offer Andrei only hot-water "tea", and when they share a bed it is a practical gesture: the two huddle close, with Kolya between them, to keep warm and to stay alive. Dunmore freely acknowledges her sources, and any writer, Russian or not, would be foolish to ignore such rich wells of material on Stalin's Russia. But for anyone reasonably familiar with the period, the bones sometimes protrude too sharply. The same is true of Dunmore's Leningrad: a quote from the opening stanza of Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" is inevitable. The motif of an unnatural city that stands on the bones of its builders is as expected as Paris in the spring. Dunmore may be following a literary tradition of personifying the city begun by Pushkin, but she imitates rather than develops the theme. - Isobel Montgomery.
Kirkus Review
A small knot of people fight to survive the Nazi siege of Leningrad in a book that feels more like history than it does like a novel. In the summer of 1941, twenty-two-year-old Anna Levin is staying with her father, Mikhail, at his small dacha outside Leningrad, where Anna keeps watch over her five-year-old brother Kolya. Mikhail is a writer whose lack of political acuity has made him unpublishable; and this failure, along with the recent loss of his wife, has made him into a premature invalid. Anna doesn't have much drive, either. She watches after the family, does some drawing, takes care of the garden, and, like everyone else, makes sure to voice politically correct enthusiasms for Comrade Stalin so that the men in black vans won't show up in the middle of the night to take them away. Then, she hears the unbelievable news of a German assault on Russia, and the story begins its lockstep march from the tensions of peacetime to the horrors of war. Despite everyone's protestations that the Fascists will never get anywhere near Leningrad, the nearer they come. Anna and her family move into the city so as not to be cut off. They are joined in their small apartment by Marina, an actress who fell from political grace years ago and was also a mistress of Mikhail's; and Andrei, a young doctor who quickly falls for Anna. As the temperature drops, so does hope. The brutal winter makes an already-unbearable situation worse, and soon people are making soup out of bread and water and praying for an end to winter. Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less of one for releasing the springs of a novel. Still, mixing an easy lyricism with gruesome honesty, she shows us what life is like for civilians in war-praying for help, saving the last crust of bread.
Booklist Review
Summers in the country, working in the garden and making homemade jam, are long gone for Anna Levin; she is in a freezing apartment caring for her five-year-old brother, a sick father, and, ironically, her father's former mistress. The year is 1941 and the Germans have laid siege to Leningrad, burning the city's only food reserves, and their steely blockade has the people living on rations of two slices of bread a day. Death has reared its ugly head everywhere, and starvation has made people ruthless toward one another in their desperate battle for survival. In the chaos of it all, Anna has found love for the first time with a tender doctor who despite their dire circumstances dares to hope and dream of a future for them both. Dunmore's portrayal of the Leningrad tragedy alerts readers' senses to all that is basically human and necessary for our survival. Heart-wrenching to read, but impossible to put down, this is quite an inspirational book. --Elsa Gaztambide
Library Journal Review
Dunmore was awarded England's first Orange Prize for her debut novel, A Spell of Winter. Here, with exquisite precision, she explores the physical and emotional sensations experienced by aspiring artist Anna during the first winter of the siege of Leningrad. The story opens in the summer of 1941 with the city's inhabitants working brutally hard to shore up defenses against the invading Germans. As the noose tightens and winter comes, their only connection to the outside world is via the frozen-over Lake Ladoga; each slice of bread and each stick of kindling becomes more precious than gold. Anna, the main support for her brother, her father, and his aging mistress, observes her own fearful starvation but hangs on grimly. Sexual overtones arrive when Andrei becomes Anna's lover and joins the miserable household. That Dunmore unravels the tangle of suffering, war, and base emotions to produce a story woven with love, hope, and desire is a celebration of widely revered human values, made especially poignant in light of the tragedy of September 11. Any library with even a smattering of World War II material will want this extraordinary novel for its readers. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/01.] Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
