| Title | : | The Siege (The Siege, #1) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0802139582 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780802139580 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2001 |
| Awards | : | Orange Prize Fiction Shortlist (2002), Whitbread Award Novel (2001) |
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 Siege (The Siege, #1) Reviews
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The novel revolves around five interwoven lives during the war when Leningrad was completely surrounded by the Germans. Winter came and there was no food or coal, it was a brutal winter and one half of the population of the city perished.
There are fantastic descriptions of what the city looked and felt like. The heroism of the people who were described was incredible. There is so much history to be learned for this book, love, determination, heroism, redemption, survival, it's all there.
Another great historical novel by Ms. Dunmore. After I read this book I remember doing a lot of research about this time in Leningrad, it was a terrible time for those who lived there.
***all time favorite. This book made such an impression on me that I still can think about it and feel as though I was there.*** -
Wow. I just finished this novel and I'm still feeling the power of the emotions it evokes. What an incredibly moving, intimate portrait of the lives of one family during the siege of Leningrad. It's like nothing I've ever read. The writing is so incredibly good - descriptive and detailed yet poetic and empathic. The message of this novel is that the human spirit can rise above the worst situations and deprivations. This book chronicles both. This story is told through the voice of Anna, a 22 year old woman who is taking care of her ailing father and her 5 year old brother, Kolya. Two other people share their apartment - a friend of the father's and a young doctor, Anna's first love.
I absolutely fell in love with Anna. By the half way point I couldn't stop reading. I didn't want to leave Anna for one moment. She and her family became real to me. I felt so sad and bereft after turning the last page. I will start the sequel immediately. -
I didn't understand until now. My eyes fill with tears, and I don't know why. But I know that it's by these things, and nothing else, that we survive. Poetry doesn't exist to make life beautiful. Poetry is life itself.
The Siege is the story of a Russian family trapped in Leningrad in the long siege by Nazi troops that took place between September 8, 1941 and January 27, 1944. The book covers the first year of the siege, including the first relentless winter. I knew, of course, that the Germans had attacked Russia and that German soldiers paid a huge price for that error, but I had no idea that it lasted for over two years and had truly given no thought to what it was like for those being blockaded behind the line.
The story revolves around Anna, a young woman in her early twenties, who is already raising her younger brother because her mother has died giving him life. Her father is a writer, who is out of favor in Stalin’s Russia. An actress, also out-of-favor, a tough red-head who becomes Anna’s friend, and a young doctor named Andrei round out the cast of characters. The details we are given regarding the effects of the winter and the absence of food make the suffering palpable.
It is hard, indeed, to imagine how anyone endures the hardships and keeps their sanity.
Anna doesn't like going past the park anymore. There are people sitting on benches, swathed in snow, planted like bulbs to wait for spring. They stay there day after day. No one comes to take them away.
One of the things history does is inform us. The past can be a warning to the future, for it has that uncanny way of repeating itself if you dare to forget the lesson it has offered you. The moment you say, “this cannot happen to us”, it might.
Pre-Covid, this might have just read like a World War II history, but post-Covid, when I got to the section where Dunmore began to talk about the city, the danger, the complacency of the people, who had always been supplied and believed they could not be completely without, I shivered with a sense that history was talking to me, directly.
Suddenly and sharply, it's obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It's crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometers, without a pig or a potato patch between them.
I fear cities are even less self-sufficient these days.
For city people it is hard to grasp that the supply chain is broken. It’s kept them going all their lives, even though the system sometimes dissolves into chaos, and prices go up and down like an undertaker's hat.
I think about how crazy people went when they thought there was going to be a shortage of toilet paper. Imagine being rationed to two pieces of bread a day—total.
This book is as tactile as a book can get. I smelled the stale breath, felt the cold, tasted the jars of jam and wedges of honey they so carefully hoarded, heard the cries of the hungry babies, and saw the hanging flesh and gaunt faces. It is a story of hardship, but it is also a story of sacrifice and survival and transcendent love.
What a remarkable way to begin a new year of reading. -
First and foremost, I'd describe The Siege as a very claustrophobic novel. It takes place in Stalingrad during the German assault but I rarely had a sense of a city in this book. It often felt like the characters were living in virtual isolation in the midst of some dystopian wasteland. It always felt the world was far removed. When a character left the apartment I saw not city streets but a kind of anonymous rural landscape. I was never quite convinced the author could see Stalingrad; not once did she make me see it. The novel's drama is almost entirely focused on the fight against starvation and the cold. I found the author went overboard with the effects of starvation as if determined to catalogue every single symptom. It was perhaps realistic but it wasn't very successful in terms of dramatic tension. It began to get very repetitive. The book needed more variety of focus. It's as if she realised this and now and again inserts an omniscient overview of the bigger picture but this didn't work for me. It was telling, not showing.
Its saving grace is the quality of the writing. It's a novel of fine passages of prose rather than memorable characters or intricately plotted and pulsating ley lines. 3.5 stars. -
This turned out to be a deeply absorbing and fascinating story about the seige of Lenigrad. It describes in detail the terrible trauma of living through such an ordeal when half the population of the city died from starvation and the cold, and their bodies were buried in mass graves.
In
The Siege we follow the day to day lives of a family living at the point of starvation and surviving on things such as wallpaper paste and tea made from water and a teaspoon of honey. At one point they eat a guinea pig taken from the laboratory at the hospital. A rare treat to have meat for dinner.
Of course life does go on. People still meet and fall in love, babies are born and sometimes the government manages to provide a ration of bread. The book is an absolute eye opener, not just in describing the awful details of how people survived this real life tragedy but also in giving a history lesson on the politics of the day and the war which caused it.
Helen Dunmore writes beautifully and makes this a book well worth reading. -
4.5 stars
Excerpt from Mikhail Levin’s writings
But here we are, looking into the face of something even more terrifying than the misery we’ve been able to pile up for ourselves. We scurry about like ants with a stick poked into their ant-heap. Why the stick’s been poked, we don’t know, but our lives and houses are upside-down just the same. That’s what war means: blunders and muddle, and doing things without understanding why you’re doing them. A long time later, if you’re lucky, someone comes along and writes things down so that they make sense, and calls his story history.
Helen Dunmore’s The Siege is a striking and intimate account of one family’s struggle for survival beginning in 1941 when German forces began to embark upon their siege of Leningrad which would ultimately last until 1944. The focus is in the first 10 months or so and demonstrates how the Levins, Anna, Kolya and Mikhail held together with a strong bond of love and desire to stay alive. I was pleased that we got a look at the family’s life before the long, hard winter months when the fear of where the next morsel would come from or when the fuel for the burzhuika would run out and no longer provide warmth and a way to cook what food they could find. The Levins were happily spending time in their dacha, or small cottage in the country, where they grew vegetables and enjoyed the beauty around them. The stark contrasts to this Russian life and the one that was forced upon them so suddenly that year demonstrated how dire their life was now in all of the scarceness.
Artistic 22 year old Anna is raising her 5 year old brother, Kolya with their father Mikhail who is a blacklisted writer. His wife passed away when Kolya was born and Anna’s fond memories of her are highlighted. Marina, an actress and a former mistress of Mikhail’s, comes to live with the Levins during the winter. A medical student named Andrei is instrumental in keeping Anna’s spirits alive and the two fall in love. We witness Anna’s fortitude and perseverance as well as her courage and resourcefulness in the face of the most dire physical and emotional circumstances a human can go through. Standing in line daily, waiting for a ration with the knowledge that it’s not enough for life and those that make the decisions know this as well. How is it possible to insure that 3 million plus people will be provided for adequately in a situation where the supply is dwindling and nothing is coming into the city. This is way too eery in the world we are living in today. Just 3 days ago, I came home from the grocery store where the shelves are consistently bare of late.
Everyone now knows what it takes to keep life in a body. You can be separated from your life so easily.
The vividness in which Dunmore’s prose is written is striking. I felt as if I were right there with Anna when she pulled the sledge to the burnt out building to struggle and search for a few pieces of wood that might be used for fuel when her strength wouldn’t allow her to even barely walk from her apartment door to the end of the street. Her will to keep going was just remarkable. Being caught up in the harsh reality that Anna is living can become quite unbearable to read about. That is the greatness of Dunmore’s writing - her ability to draw you in and make you feel agony as Anna calculated how long their supplies will last and whether consuming “nutrients” from paste would keep them alive a little longer.
How good it is to fall asleep, and not to feel hunger any more. You should never wake anyone once they’ve got away, deep into their dreams, where there’s food.
But Anna can’t sleep…She can think about her drawing. The figures are sharp on the surface of her mind…The gaping mouths, the heavy coats hung on racks of bones, the shell-shattered streets, the purple faces of old women, the white snow falling, the uncleared snow in the streets, the children scrabbling in piles of rubbish while tongues of ice poke out of the gutters. A whole city is going to sleep. A forest of ice is growing around us. -
The tragic story of the first year of the siege of Leningrad is seen through the eyes of 23-year-old Anna Levin. She is a nursery school assistant with artistic talent and the gift of common sense. Anna is the primary caregiver of her five-year-old brother, Kolya, and the homemaker for her widowed writer father, Mikhail. When Hitler's German army surrounded Leningrad in 1941, they cut off the supply lines for food and fuel to the citizens of the city on the Baltic Sea. People scrambled to accumulate as much food as possible because they could not live on money, and food was used to barter for other goods.
An older actress, Marina, and a medical student, Andrei, also move into the Levin's apartment. The Russian winter is frigid and food rations are meager. When the Germans bombed an important food warehouse, there was no way to feed everyone in Leningrad. In the background, political purges are also on their minds since Mikhail's writing had not reflected Stalin's principles of "Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful."
Reading about the extreme cold and starvation that claimed so many lives over the first winter of the siege is certainly upsetting. But "The Siege" is a riveting story because Helen Dunmore's lovely, sensuous writing brought the five characters in the Levin apartment to life. The group was resilient and sacrificed to keep young Kolya alive. I felt myself caring about their outcomes, and worried when Anna or Andrei were faint with hunger, but continued on in the cold to buy the food rations or work at the hospital. The author kept politics to a minimum so a reader feels like "The Siege" is a story about real people trying to cope with terrible circumstances. The course of history turned ordinary people into the heroic as they struggled to survive. -
Waiting for Spring
Helen Dunmore's marvelous novel (surely her best*) begins with Spring in 1941:And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed. Ice broke loose from the compacted mass around the Strelka. Seagulls preened on the floes as the current swept them under bridges, and down the widening Neva to the sea.
It will end with Spring a year later, but by that time a large part of the Leningrad population will have died of cold or malnutrition, as the German armies hold the city in a relentless siege.
Dunmore begins gently, almost lyrically, in a small dacha outside the city. Not that everyday life is easy. Her protagonist, 23-year-old Anna Mikhailova Levin, has had to abandon her studies as an artist to look after her baby brother Kolya, when her mother died in childbirth five years before. Her father, a writer, has been blacklisted by the Soviet Writers' Union, so Anna must work in a daycare nursery to support them, suffering under a boss whose strict adherence to socialist doctrines does not disguise her dislike of children. It is a period when nobody dare speak openly, for fear of denunciation and arrest. But Russia still has a pact with Germany and war seems far off.
By the end of summer, all has changed. Germany invades Russia, and Leningrad is marked for destruction. The city's food warehouses are firebombed, its supply lines are cut, and strict food rationing is imposed. The citizens are mobilized to dig ditches, build defenses, work in factories, but slowly everything grinds to a halt; everyone now has one business only, survival. Anna holes up in a tiny apartment with Kolya, her father, and two others from outside the family: one is Marina Petrovna, a blacklisted actress and her father's old friend; the other, Andrei, is a young medical student, and Anna's first love. For love blooms against all odds; there may be little romance in two fully-dressed unwashed emaciated bodies huddling together for warmth, but there is something deeper: responsibility and caring. And the political climate changes also:Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It is not like trying to read mirror writing any more. Everything gets clearer day by day, as siege and winter eat into their lives. The coils of Soviet life are losing their strength. There's only the present left, and it has burned away both past and future.
Dunmore's ability to paint simultaneously a vast canvas and an intimate portrait has naturally been compared to Tolstoy. But as the situation worsens, many succumb to the inevitable, but others find an impossible will to survive, I though more of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Dunmore does not quite reach his spiritual transcendence, but she has the same deep belief in the human spirit. Spring does come, and the authorities find ways to get some food in and inhabitants out. The siege will continue for eighteen more months, but its grip has been loosened. The survivors have rediscovered their humanity.
*The others I have read, in my personal order of preference, are:
Zennor in Darkness,
A Spell of Winter, and
Talking to the Dead. -
...The Fuehrer has decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth.
Such a harrowing read as Dunmore gives us an insight into what it was like to live through the first winter of the siege of Leningrad. In another author's hands this might have been lush with romantic melodrama, but Dunmore keeps it clean and cold, allowing the details to speak for themselves: Kolya's childish whining as he cannot understand why he can't have another spoonful of precious hoarded jam; the quiet yet deep relationship between Anna and Andrei who fall in love in the most inauspicious of circumstances; the visceral cold as temperatures drop and water freezes in rooms with no power; the effect on human nature: the frightening competition for almost non-existent resources, the moments of compassion and friendship; the look and feel and smell of bodies slowly starving.
Through it all, what emerges is the will and determination of some people to survive: a paean to Leningrad and the human spirit. -
Story set immediately before and during the first year of the Siege of Leningrad - it focuses around 5 characters: a dissident writer Mikhail, his nursery-school teacher daughter Anna, his son Kolya (as his Doctor wife - the strong willed Vera - died in childbirth, Anna effectively is Kolya's mother) and Marina (a reclusive and discredited artist friend of Mikhail, who comes to live with them after the siege and who it becomes clear was a once lover of Mikhail) and Andrei (a Doctor who works on a volunteer force with Mikhail, visits Anna to tell her he is wounded but OK and then gradually becomes her lover and eventually moves into their appartment). Another two characters (literally in a fable from the Napoleonic attack on Russia told by her father) and figuratively throughout are hunger and the winter.
The book is mainly in the present tense which seems to fit well the immediacy of the story and the day-to-day (if not hour-to-hour nature of their existence and fight for survival). Anna is normally the main character (despite the book being written in the third person) so the occasional sections shifting to another character (in particular the passages switching to Pavlov - the logistical planner for Leningrad's hopelessly inadequate food supplies - can jar).
Similarly as the siege takes hold and food supplies dwindle and almost disappear the book and characters close in on themselves and their appartment and on simple survival and the need for sustenance and this fits the author's terse but poetic writing style.
A haunting tale which I found incredibly engrossing (at the time one of my very young children wasn't eating very well and I found it hard to not somehow think that this was a crucial matter of her health; also I was tired and felt reluctant to succumb to sleep because it might be like surrendering to the cold and not waking up again) as well as beautifully written. The story is extremely readable - easy to and best read in a few sittings.
Some of the details are terrible - such as the baby opposite who dies of malnutrition from its young mother's inadvertent ignorance and neglect, the bodies left dead in houses (given the cold there and the impossibility of burial). The description of cold and hunger and its physical and psychological effects (with Andrei acting as an excuse to introduce scientific detail) are shocking but compelling.
There are great reference to Russian literature (especially Pushkin), the author describes the Baltic seasons beautifully and gives a good insight into Stalinist Russia. -
“Suddenly and sharply it’s obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It’s crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometers, without a pig or a potato patch between them. It only works in the way that fiction works, by making people collaborate.”
We often say, “Things could be worse,” but we don’t usually let ourselves delve deep into how bad they could be. Well, this novel provides a deep dive into just how bad things can be.
It’s a story of the Siege of Leningrad. As part of Hitler’s eastward expansion, he invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Not long after, the German army surrounded Leningrad, a city of 2.5 million people, creating a blockade. It was an attempt to starve them out, and it lasted almost 900 days. The Soviets ultimately prevailed, but over a million Leningraders died, mostly from starvation.
The very word “siege” sounds medieval, and the details imagined in this novel are bleak and horrifying. But it makes you think about just how strong the will to survive is.
This is written with some distance between the reader and the characters, which is probably a blessing. We see Anna Levin, her father, and her brother Kolya, and the others that later make up their family unit, but there is a feeling of detachment from them. I found this style uncomfortable at first, but as I went on, realized it made the events of their lives feel less dramatic, but because of that, somehow more real.
I won’t forget this story. I won’t look at food the same way for a long while. I’ll remember the joy of finding a tiny but full-of-vitamins onion, the way Anna created boot liners out of felt from the underside of her father’s desk blotter, the shock of what you can do when you must. -
Nursery school assistant, Anna, spends much time bemoaning her fate when we first meet her. Her beloved mother, Vera, died giving birth to her young brother, Kolya, meaning that – instead of being the student she dreams of – she works in the nursery where she can care for him. Her father, Mikhail, is a writer in a Russia where words can be dangerous. When we meet her, she is at her family’s small dacha, planting seeds. However, although the Russians are used to food shortages and making do, they are unaware that this is really a time of plenty. For Anna’s dacha is outside Leningrad, it is June 1941, and war is coming…
This, then, is the story of Anna and her family. Her father, Mikhail, brother Kolya, Marina Petrovna, her father’s old lover, who returns looking for somewhere to stay and of medical orderly, Andrei, who falls in love with Anna. This is a bleak story of sacrifice, hunger, cold and war.
I have always enjoyed Helen Dunmore’s novels. It is, perhaps, hard to enjoy this, because of the subject matter, but this is written without any maudlin emotion. Instead, this is people at the very end of their endurance, but still the will to live is strong and so the small group do their best to survive against the odds. In a way, this is a novel about the human spirit and how people cope in the most difficult of circumstances. -
As I read this book on my couch after dinner, drinking a beer and enjoying the warm summer night, I found myself tensing against a monstrous cold that had become so physical that I couldn't unfeel it despite my knowledge that it was only words on paper.
In The Siege, Dunmore weaves together the huge and small stories of the siege of Leningrad in a way that reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath and The Book Thief. It's very effective; the grand descriptions of the land and the cold create a mythical world, and the straightforward lives of the Levin family make that world real and terrible. It was sometimes hard to read, especially while cradling my newborn baby, but so humanely observant that I couldn't put it down.
Dunmore's writing--especially her verbs--astonished me throughout. I want to read everything she's written. (But first I'm going to read City of Thieves, at Roses's recommendation, for what looks to be a very different angle on the same damn siege.) -
It took me a while to get into this novel about the siege of Leningrad. The pre-siege stuff where the characters are introduced particularly Anna’s father weren’t that interesting to me and Anna herself, is just too nice maybe.. I’m not sure what didn’t work for me but once the siege is underway particularly the winter scenes, are incredibly powerful. You can feel the cold and sense the hunger and desperation. Anna’s friend, Evgenia is a great character. I wish she was in the book more. Add in some of Pushkins poetry and while not a pleasure to read (it’s bleak) there’s still hope, resilience and strength in the people.
-
I found this book about the starving of Leningrad to be powerfully moving. It is a tale of a put-together family: a widowed father, and a daughter who is raising her younger brother, joined by the father’s previous mistress and finally a doctor falling in love with the daughter. They must try to survive a cold winter with very little food.
As I read this book, I kept thinking about Hunger, the book by Knut Hamsun. This book seemed more real to me, with sympathetic characters, in dire circumstances. The book frequently references the writing of Pushkin. I wish I had read this book closer to my reading of Eugene Onegin. So, if these three books are on your reading list, I would read the Pushkin book first and would read Hunger last, with this book in the middle.
I think one reason the novel was so fascinating to me is that I knew so little of the actual WW2 history in Russia, and not even the geography of St. Petersburg. I kept looking at maps, and researching things as I read. In brief, the German Army surrounded Leningrad and cut off supplies to the city. They didn’t bomb it ceaselessly like they did London. They just starved people to death.
I learned about dachas, which are colorful summer cottages that city dwellers would escape to on weekends, and where the citizens could have kitchen gardens. In some respects, they are like the Michigan or Wisconsin summer houses that Chicagoans escape to each summer.
One aspect of the novel was the writing about food, its production and distribution, and its nutrition. Cities are a social construct, a fact made absolutely clear by this book. The novel made real how dependent we are on these things and on each other.
Imagine if you had to grow all of the food you require to live through a winter. Could you do it? Perhaps you could get a ration of one piece of bread per person. Could you survive? How soon would your cupboards be empty? And then, add in no heat and soon enough, no running water. I know our ancestors had to do these things, but they led a more agrarian lifestyle than modern city residents. They raised vegetables and chickens, and cut firewood for their stoves. They had wells.
Additionally, the book introduced new foods to me, like pashka, which I guess is like a spreadable cheesecake with dried fruits and almonds, served at Easter. I don’t know if I will attempt to make that. However, at a very minimum, I think I will order some cloudberry jam — something I had never heard of and which supposedly tastes like strawberries and peaches.
I read this book as a Buddy Read in the Goodreads group, Catching Up With the Classics. Thanks to my fellow readers for a great discussion, as usual! -
"The high-up ones start things, but it's us who have to finish them off."
The bottom line of all wars!
I have always liked reading novels reflecting the war and the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people's lives. This is a story celebrating love, life and survival through the second world war, World War II.
First, as a rookie reader in history, let's start with some information to backup our historic background information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_W...
And know more about the siege of Leningrad (which is currently known as Saint Petersburg) from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_o...
Leningrad, the city that showcased the scenes of our passionate story of fear, courage, loss, and love!
How this country suffered due to the siege and lost its population in the process. Suffering from winter and starvation. Seeing your dear ones die in front of your eyes, cold-bloodedly!
It is the story of Anna, the girl who lost her mother when her younger brother was born, Kolya. Living in Russian country with routine life that kills every dreamer, while knowing nothing about what the fate hides for them.
Anna's father, the writer who is abandoned and rejected, due to his pertinence and thoughts. He is a man with a background.
Vera, Anna's mother, who died before the story even starts, and starting with her death a series of complications for Anna. Anna is stuck to be mother-like from an early stage of her life. Taking care of Kolya became her job, and actually, what she is living for.
Andrei, the man that meets Anna's father during the war, as a doctor, he keeps him alive healing his wounds fighting the Germans, and keeps his writings safe to deliver it back to his daughter, Anna. Where they meet for the first time.
Marina, the banned actress. The lady that fought for what she loved. The actress who has many stories to tell. One for the audience, and the other which is the only true story. A love story!
All these characters, the war forces them to live under one ceiling, in one home. There home!
Who can tell that wars can bring any good. Wars only destroys humanity. Nourishes hatred within our souls.
-
The Siege is set in 1941 and is centred on the first winter of the two and a half year German siege of Leningrad. It is also a love story.
The novel opens during an idyllic June evening which is the moment things will irrevocably change as it is also the eve of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.
As the siege takes hold the novel concentrates on the contents of the store cupboard, the dangerous trips to collect the bread ration or to find wood, and the daily struggle to survive. Food and family history become the centre of the narrative.
I wish I liked it more. I was never invested in, or convinced by, the characters and always felt at a remove from the grim events. Anyone familiar with the horrendous history of the siege could reasonably predict how this novel would play out. The family history detracted from the hunger and desperation. Strange and disappointing to report that this novel does not meet the challenge of bringing the history to life. Or maybe it's a case of right book wrong time? Either way, I am relieved to have finished.
3/5
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The 3 star rating reflects my reaction to this book rather than its quality. I can appreciate that this is not a book to be enjoyed as such given its horrific subject matter but I really didn’t enjoy the experience of reading it. I found the narrative stilted and too episodic and I didn’t feel particular empathy for any of the characters. It was always going to be depressing but I found it turgidly so by halfway through and I am very grateful to have finished. Having read other reviews, I’m definitely in the minority here. I admire Helen Dunmore’s writing but I simply did not enjoy this book.
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Excellent historical novel, which opens in 1941 Leningrad at the precipice of the German invasion, is the story of Anna, an artist and her family and their survival in the siege. Moving. Terrific read for anyone interested in historical dramas of this time period, or who just like a gripping, beautifully written story of survival and love.
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Odd to be reading this book when the radio is reporting women and children starving in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya. We never learn the lessons of history.
This book tells the story of another siege. That of Leningrad in 1941. It was encircled by the invading German army for an incredible three years during the second world war. The book tells the story of the Levin family. Principally 23 year old Anna, who has to care for her wounded and enfeebled father Mikhail, and her 5 year old brother Kolya. As the siege gradually takes hold they retreat from their well stocked country dacha to a two roomed apartment in the city. They are joined there by Anna's lover Andrei and her father's former lover Marina. They must survive the freezing and brutal winter of 1941, dodging shells, incendiaries and bombs, and living on just two meagre slices of bread per day.
The book is really Anna's story. It is her strength that will pull her family through. She has already sacrificed her own future to care for her young brother after their mother dies and now she gives up her own rations and strength to go out and forage for food and fuel day after day. It is a story of defiance, love and the human spirit in the most awful of circumstances. I could feel the chill and the hunger sinking into my bones with every page I turned and it is hard not to speculate how you yourself would cope in such dire and straitened conditions. The descriptions of the empty and ice bound, eerie city streets, littered with bodies and hiding the threat of menace around every corner are haunting. Fights break out over the smallest crust of bread or scrap of wood for the fire. People are living like this right now, in this century. It is a hard thought to tally.
An intense and sobering read. -
Beautiful and rightfully bleak. 4/5 stars.
This review was originally posted on
my book blog.
I got a copy of this from the library. It sat on the table and stared at me for four weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to progress past the opening page on which there is a reproduction of the order from Nazi High Command for Leningrad (St Petersburg) to be wiped off the face of the earth. I had a feeling reading this one would take strength, and I was right.
Obviously, any book which attempts to faithfully recreate an insider’s experience of the siege of Leningrad isn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows. But just how traumatic reading this book is, is testament to the tremendous skill of the writer. The descriptions of piercing cold and gnawing hunger are so powerful you find yourself turning the heating up and going in search of biscuits.
Dunmore’s research must have been painstaking to recreate the Leningrad of the time so effectively. And I imagine reading first-hand survivor accounts of the conditions inside the city couldn’t have been easy.
The author also deserves praise for bringing such an important story to my attention because, apart from some vague recollections of hearing it mentioned, it’s part of WWII history which managed to slip past me. I don’t think we covered this in school, even though 1.5 million people died in Leningrad in the winter of 1941.
Overall: powerful and moving, with brilliant descriptions and complex characters. Although, as you’d expect, this is also a bleak read only to be approached if you think you can stomach it. -
I am a big fan of historical fiction set during WWII and will never miss the opportunity to explore this topic from new angles. The Siege of Leningrad features in one of my all-time favourite historical novels,
The Bronze Horseman series by Paullina Simons, and I was very keen to explore it through the eyes of another author.
Dunmore’s writing style is unique and compelling and she manages to put a whole new perspective on that terrible historical event for me. Whilst we do have an MC in Anna Levin, a 22-year old Russian girl who lives in a small apartment with her father and younger brother, Dunmore’s novel explores the effects on the siege on the general population of Leningrad by giving small snapshots into many other lives that have been affected by cold, hunger and fear. Her vivid descriptions of the era and the terrible conditions instantly transported me into a harsh and unforgiving landscape where death claimed hundreds of thousands of people over one terrible winter. I particularly appreciated the viewpoint of the man having to make decisions on how to distribute the dwindling rations fairly to a starving population, which beautifully described the terrible decisions that had to be made behind the scenes. It is obvious that Dunmore has done her research, and her descriptions of the physical manifestations of hunger and malnutrition are realistic and haunting.
If I had to describe this novel with one word only, it would be: humbling. It is difficult to imagine the pain and terror of a population under siege, people starving and freezing to death and unable to escape the trap of a bombarded and surrounded city. Yet Dunmore manages to convey these feelings perfectly in her novel, which plays out like a series of short black-and-white newsreels that will haunt you for a long time to come. I found Dunmore’s style of giving us a large, sweeping picture of the city and its inhabitants interspersed by more intimate moments with Anna and her family very effective in conveying the terrors of war. In Anna we have the embodiment of resilience and the human will to survive, which managed to make the overall theme one of hope when it seems that all is lost. All in all, I thought that The Siege was an interesting, flawlessly researched and well written novel that will appeal to lovers of historical fiction with an interest in WWII. I now look forward to reading the next book in the series, which follows Anna’s life after the war.
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Helen Dunmore brought Germany’s World War II siege of Leningrad (Russia) to life in her outstanding novel,
The Siege. For 900 days, the Germans surrounded and continually bombed the roughly 3 million civilians still living in Leningrad. The bombs destroyed the food storage facilities, and the German army prevented any supplies to be brought into the city. Germany’s intention was to starve the Russians to death. During the bitterly cold winter of 1941-1942, it is estimated that 100,000 people died every month - mostly from starvation. It is this winter that Dunmore primarily wrote about.
It is incomprehensible for me to imagine how the civilians survived on the equivalent of 2-3 slices of bread a day, for months on end while also being subjected to sub-zero degree temperatures with no fuel to heat their homes. In addition, living under Stalin’s repressive regime brought additional fears and hardships. Under these conditions, only the strong in body, strong in will and strong in resourcefulness stood a chance of surviving.
Dunmore wrote a very believable (and well-researched) story on this horrific siege, seen through the life of one woman, Anna Mikhailovna Levin, and the people in her life. Survival was a day-to-day miracle, and Dunmore included many of the survival skills the citizens learned to use during the long siege. -
I've been given this as a book club read. I've read the first chapter and I am distinctly unimpressed.
I don't like books that break the fourth wall. It annoys me, destroys the illusion and makes me feel patronised. It was bad enough when Enid Blyton did it - but I can't stomach it in an adult read unless it is done for comedic effect or it is a memoir/first person narrative and the writer is speaking in real time. I can't accept it in a piece of work firmly set in the 1940s.
This single sentence on the blurb on the back rang warning bells for me:
"They will soon discover what it is like to be so hungry you boil shoe leather to make soup, so cold you burn furniture and books."
I know what that means to say but what it actually says to me is that they are going to find out that when they get hungry I will be caused to do something!!!
This is the kind of thing that grates on me like squeaky chalk on a blackboard but I gave it the benefit of the doubt as often writers don't get the choice of what goes on the back of their books.
I will give it more of a go and hope it improves. But I have flicked forward and have to say there seems to be a lot of flowery writing in this and I am not any keener on flowery writing than I am on being directly addressed from the page. -
I wavered between 3 and 4 stars. Given its subject matter, it's hard for me to say that I enjoyed this book. I certainly found it interesting and very well written. Dunmore intensely evokes the horror of the circumstances of people in Leningrad in 1941. And in this respect, it is essentially a book about hunger; how hunger and starvation defined every moment and feeling of the characters in that time and place. The writing even simulates the lightheadedness, disjointed thinking and hallucinations that come with starvation. Having said this, given the dreariness of the subject matter, it is definitely not a book for everyone.
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Unfortunately Helen Dunmore passed away on June 5, 2017. I did like The Siege....my favorite amongst the books I read of hers. As I recall she was one of the earl winners of the Orange Prize.
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On June 22, 1941 Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. The Germans surprised the Russians who suffered enormous casualties and retreated into the interior. The Russians had been warned by the British of Nazi intentions, but Joseph Stalin ignored the British, reasoning that London wanted to create another front in its war against Germany. Stalin did expect Hitler to break the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939 but he believed he had more time to prepare. Stalin was in such shock as German troops marched through Russia that he disappeared for ten days, probably fearing that why would the Russian people support a murdering dictator, but the reality was that Stalin, was their murdering dictator and Hitler was not! The support for Stalin and the “Russian Motherland” emerges in Helen Dunmore’s novel, THE SIEGE which takes place during the siege of Leningrad that lasted from September 1941 to 1944. As New York Times reporter, Harrison Salisbury labeled the events in Leningrad, “The 900 Days,” the title of his book about the city that suffered the death of over 650,000 people. Dunmore’s novel provides insight into the lives of every day Russians as they struggled through starvation, fear of German artillery shells and bombs, the lack of any bureaucratic relief by city officials, and the constant paranoia that they could not trust their own government. The reader is presented with a number of characters; the family of Anna, her younger brother Kolya who she raises after her mother died in child birth, and her father Mikhail, a writer and poet who has been rejected by the Soviet Writers Union because he has not adapted to the tenets of socialist realism, and Marina, an aging actress who comes to live with them. We are also exposed to Andrei; a young doctor who reports the horrors of the siege from Leningrad’s remaining hospitals, and other characters like Dimitri Pavlov, who is sent from Moscow to address the city’s food shortages. Pavlov realizes that Leningrad, a city mostly of islands, similar to Stockholm, is now a “stone island,” and “has got to depend upon its own resources” to survive. (198) what are those negligible resources? A government ukase suggests the nutritional value of wallpaper paste that once boiled can provide sustenance for those who are starving.
The story is set when Mikhail’s wife Vera dies in childbirth, thrusting motherhood on her daughter Anna before the German invasion. The paranoia of Stalin’s Russia before the arrival of the Germans is readily apparent from the outset of the book. Anna, a nursery school teacher assistant, fears raising her voice at work as Kolya is play acting the Russian Civil War between the White and Red soldiers because she might be heard by her boss who she fears will denounce her. The Great Terror of the 1930s is in the air as it seems everyone is afraid that someone will denounce them to the authorities. Stalin has warned his people that “wreckers, traitors, enemies, and saboteurs….had infiltrated the Party itself, and were among the elite, masking themselves as irreproachable Party activists and committee members. But how could you ever prove it wasn’t a mask, Anna wonders. Only by ripping off your own flesh…” (21)
Dunmore provides a description of how Leningraders attempted to deal with the German advance through Anna’s eyes as she works on digging trenches and tank traps. The bombing of food warehouses and Leningrad’s geographical isolation make any defensive preparations useless in dealing with the siege. Leningrad’s citizens are urbanites who only know how to forage for food by queuing up at food centers, not by using what the earth provides. One might ask why Leningraders were able to survive as well as they did, probably because they had experience of starvation in the 1930s when Stalin’s collectivization policies created the lack of food. In a way Stalinist agricultural policies might be considered somewhat normal in the minds of Soviet citizens. The queuing before the war for food and goods created a mentality that was put to good use during the siege and created the false hope that food would soon be available. Leningrad’s main problem was its “impossible arithmetic” for a city with 3.5 million people with little food resources other than wallpaper paste and boiling leather to obtain fluid to make soup. Leningrad is a city of “a million flailing hands” as people constantly reach for food. (146)
To best understand Leningrad’s plight I would recommend that the reader place a map of Leningrad in front of them to understand how difficult it was to supply the city. Lake Ladoga to the east was useful once it froze during the winter months, but the Germans made it very hazardous for any truck convoys as they continued to bomb the ice. The result is the grim process of the black market that Anna has to deal with to obtain anything. People become animals as they try to survive. In a way the best means of survival is sleep because it provides an escape from hunger. As Anna points out “you should never wake anyone once they’ve gotten away, deep into their dreams, where there is food.” (189)
The relationship between Anna and Andrei is a tender one that is developed nicely by the author. Considering the conditions one would think that love would have difficulty flourishing, but in this instance Anna and Andrei’s needs are such that their relationship becomes a life line for survival. Having survived the winter of 1941-1942, Leningraders were greeted by spring and improved food rations and supplies. Dunmore describes the scenes of people planting vegetables in city parks and the optimism that those who were still alive would survive the German siege. Dunmore leaves the reader in the spring of 1942, but for the remaining population of Leningrad the war would continue for two more years. If you find the time to read THE SIEGE, Dunmore’s sequel THE BETRAYAL will not disappoint. If you are interested in the history of the siege of Leningrad I would recommend Michael Jones’ LENINGRAD: STATE OF SIEGE -
OK, I accept that most people think this is wonderful so it can't be the book - it must be me. But I'm bored out of my skull and can't bear to go on with it. I feel nothing for any of these characters. They simply haven't come to life. At 34%, there is no story - just endless descriptions of life with the occasional untragic tragedy thrown in in an attempt to up the emotional impact. But there is no emotional impact about the deaths of people we have been told nothing about. It's like the guys in red shirts in Star Trek - they exist only to be killed, and when they are, we don't care. The city also fails completely to come to life - were it not for the repeated mentions of cabbages and beetroots it would be hard to know we were in Russia. Could it be more clichéd? Then, of course, there's the present tense - sigh!
And now we're going to have a love affair, complete with meaningful eye contact and hardening nipples. Is that really the most exciting plot she could come up with? Better to have written a factual book if she just wanted to describe the horrors of the siege. Nope! Maybe the other 66% is brilliant, but I'll take my chances. Not for me. -
Since the sequel was just longlisted for the Booker and I dimly remembered reading and disliking this one a long time ago, i wanted to make sure and indeed I remembered it well; the main issue of the novel for me and the one that basically made it a fail is the world building; the 1941 Leningrad just does not feel Russian or Soviet; it can be "city generic TM" under very "nasty circumstances TM" in which "characters TM" try and survive...
It may have literary qualities, but it would have better been set in a place the author understands not in one she absolutely does not get
i will try the sequel though based on this I doubt I will like it better, though you never know... -
Impressive for the way Dunmore conveys what it must have been like to live through a seige, in this case the seige of Leningrad during WWII. Less impressive when it comes to the characters. I failed to believe in them fully and I don't know why. Was it because she used names from Tolstoy which caused me to make comparisons subconsciously? I would appreciate hearing other people's reactions.
