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Hunger

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WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:

An elderly Russian émigré 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. Plot wise, there are some intriguing twists and turns as the war progresses . . . . This is a well-crafted novel that works largely because of its small, evocative moments

Publishers Weekly

Insightful and gripping. . . .Hunger examines both the limitations and the possibilities of the human character

The San Francisco Chronicle

ELISE BLACKWELL

HUNGER

Set during Hitler’s siege of Leningrad, Elise Blackwell’s beautiful debut novel is the deeply moving story of one man’s confrontation with his own morality. A scientist, but a man of powerful personal appetites, unexpectedly finds himself with a choice that is informed too much by his private hungers. The danger he faces is betraying not only the woman he loves but also the principles he holds most dear.

BOOK INFORMATION

$11.95 us / $14.95 C | Fiction Paperback | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | 146 pages

April 2008

ISBN: 978-1-932961-50-8 | Carton Quantity: 36

EISBN: 978-1-93607-133-3

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READ EXCERPT

OF ALL OF US who endured after Vitalii’s quick decline, Lidia was the one who changed the most and fastest. Lidia had been so beautiful that I would have married her instead of Alena had I met her first. As it was, I came very near—I fill with shame at how near—to leaving Alena for her.
But I was lucky that I did not, because the secret to Lidia’s beauty was comfort. She was at her most beautiful, witty, and generous when her skin was warmed by the sun—and food was perched between her hand and mouth.
She was so subject to strong cravings that if she got a certain kind of cake in mind, she would walk clear across Leningrad to the bakery that made it best. She would leave work in the middle of the day to steam a fig pudding, coming back hours later with a riddle inside her broad smile. If it was me on her mind, she would have me in any vacant room or, barely concealed, outside.
My enchantment with her began during an expedition to Malta, in the island’s hottest month. I would allow my arm to fall onto Lidia’s, gaze at the ribbon of her neck between her heavy black hair and white clavicle, watch her dark lips while she tore pan chocolat with her strong teeth. She could eat three at a single sitting.
My Alena, with her more subtle, almost colorless attractions, had stayed home from that trip on account of the second of the babies that never came. After it was all over, I knew that I would stay with Alena until death divided us.
Yet on many nights, after Alena and I made love or if we did not, I would lie awake and think about Lidia’s colors, her deep-bellied laugh, her vigorous appetite for sweets, her hips wide enough to pass infants.
But, as I have said, I am lucky, if you can call anyone who lived through Leningrad’s starvation winter lucky—and, in truth, we all were—to have stayed with my small, dear, strong wife. When Leningrad emptied of comfort and became only the case of a pillow on hard ground, all of its downy feathers blown away, Lidia’s attractions, physical and metaphysical, gusted away as well.
Without comfort, her clever sarcasm was deboned into mere complaint. Without sun, her translucent skin turned sallow. Our trips to warm places had always kept her touched by air and sun, kept her skin clear, its white stained pink in just the right places. After the longest winter, she yellowed like inexpensive paper, and bumps rose from her forehead and chin. She had always carried a few more pounds than she needed. They had suited her, made her stomach soft and her bosom large, while the effort of collecting kept her strong.
Though she never got as skinny as some during the starvation winter—and I have my ideas about why this was so—she went slack with lack of food and exertion.
Of course, like so many, Lidia found ways to eat. She had lost much of her charm, had lost the things that had come so close to tempting me away from my Alena, but still she was a woman and never an ugly one. For such a woman there was the possibility of associating with particular men, the kind of men who could still receive packages from Moscow with cans of evaporated milk, dried salmon, a square of chocolate.
And there was meat on the black market. Horse meat, it was said, but there could not have been more than one or two bony horses left in the whole city by the end of the hunger winter.

THE AUTHOR

Elise Blackwell

Elise Blackwell is the author of four previous novels: Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, Grub, and An Unfinished Score. Her short stories and essays have been widely published, and her work has been named to various best-of-the-year lists, translated into several languages, and adapted for the stage as well as a song by The Decemberists. She teaches at the University of South Carolina, where she is also organizer and host of The Open Book.

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