ACCLAIM FOR
ELISE BLACKWELL’S
Hunger
“An exquisite little book. . . . A multicolored treat. . . . Blackwell craftily weaves history and botany through this utterly devourable narrative. . . . Hunger, like any great book, raises as many questions as it answers. . . . A compact embarrassment of riches.”
— Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times
“All the more chilling for its poetic economy, Hunger captures a sweeping catastrophe through one man’s tale of belated conscience. It is a haunting reminder that history has no mercy, that no matter how lofty our circumstances or our ideals, we may be tested terribly at any moment by the times in which we live.”
— Julia Glass, author of the
National Book Award–winning Three Junes
“A story of desperation in its rawest form. . . . Insightful and gripping. . . . Hunger examines both the limitations and the possibilities of the human character when deprived of the ability to satisfy primal needs. . . . Blackwell’s stark novel is fascinating for its study of how human behavior shifts when faced with the most extreme circumstances and when motivated by fear. Her characters strive to make sense of suffering, to find meaning in it, but are bereft. Hunger brings human behavior into sharp relief.”
— Carmela Ciuraru, San Francisco Chronicle
“A lyrical, haunting story about the cost of survival.”
— Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
“A remarkable, fact-based story of heroism and self-sacrifice under the harshest of war’s privations and of the desperate will to survive. . . . The prose of Hunger is terse, stripped to essentials, but it produces a lilting, nearly poetic quality. The detail is exacting and freshly presented. . . . A compelling exploration of the moral chasm that war can create.”
— Harold Parker, BookPage
“An evocative account of a nameless man’s efforts to survive while all around him are dying. . . . Blackwell is brave in her assertions even if her narrator isn’t.”
— Mary McCay, New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Ms. Blackwell writes in a lucid, serene style, which contrasts with her grim subject matter and increases its nightmarish quality. . . . As the narrator recalls these gruesome stories in small, slow-moving vignettes, they build like stanzas of a prose poem. Juxtaposed one against the other, they suggest a profoundly disturbing reality.”
— Diane Scharper, Wall Street Journal
“An eccentric, courageous, and poetic study of human beings in extremis.”
— Julia Blackburn, author of
The Leper’s Companions and Old Man Goya
“A riveting fictional account, based on real events. . . . This stark debut novel is a poignant look at a wrenching period of history.”
— Kristin Kloberdanz, Chicago Tribune
“A quietly effective, poignant debut. . . . Blackwell offers gemlike observations and sensory detail. . . . 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 furnishes the novel with many of its tensions and delights. . . . A well-crafted novel that works largely because of its small, evocative moments.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Blackwell’s disciplined economy of prose enables her to write a complex story in concise, lean chapters. . . . The juxtaposition of passages exploding with the fertile images of Babylonia’s famed Hanging Gardens against the sterility of a life where even tree bark is a luxury gives a heightened intensity and human face to a historical story.”
— Joan Hinkemeyer, Denver Rocky Mountain News
“A sparse, exquisitely written story. . . . This tale of cowardice, bravery, and betrayal will linger long after the book is returned to the shelf.”
— Robert Francis, Aptos Times
Hunger
by
ELISE BLACKWELL
Copyright © 2003 by Elise Blackwell
Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Elise Blackwell and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, April 2003 First Back Bay trade paperback edition, May 2004
The conversation with Elise Blackwell reprinted in the reading group guide at the back of this book first appeared at IdentityTheory.com. Copyright © 2003 Matthew Borondy. Reprinted with permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blackwell, Elise.
Hunger / by Elise Blackwell. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-316-73895-6 (hc) / 0-316-90719-7 (pb)
1. Saint Petersburg (Russia) — History — Siege, 1941–1944 — Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Russia — Saint Petersburg — Fiction. 3. Rare plants — Fiction. 4. Scientists — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.L3257 H86 2003
813’.6 —dc21
2002034130
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Q-FF
Book designed by Victoria Hartman
Printed in the United States of America
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