Hunger

Unforgettable writing, much like a long poem. Read it over a long, relaxed dinner.

This is such a small book to contain so very much. Elise Blackwell has created something very special indeed with this, her first novel. With eloquence and empathy, she transports the reader back in time to Leningrad in 1941 - the German army approaches, and the people in the city prepare for the attack, but it comes in a form they do not expect. The Germans simply cut the city off from the outside world, and sit and wait for the inhabitants to starve to death.Blackwell's narrator is an elderly Russian botanist living in America, looking back at his time in the blockaded city, remembering his wife and coworkers - remembering the choices that he and the others made in order to survive. Before and during the war, he traveled the world with his colleagues, collecting specimens of plants and seeds from every continent in order to study them and find ways to better feed people in need. The institute where he works - like every facet of Russian society at the time - is caught up in the political upheaval of a country being painfully reborn. The director of the institute, once widely revered and respected both as a scientist and a human being, falls out of favor with the authorities and is sentenced to die. Those who are left behind must choose to bend and survive or resist and perish - professionally, physically or both. Once the German blockade of the city begins, however, they realize that there are far more pressing choices to make. Do they open the storehouses of the institute and distribute the grain samples to the people, or do they preserve them in the name of science, for future generations? The scientists at the institute agree to preserve the samples, to starve before they touch them - but it's a difficult promise to keep.All around them in Leningrad, people from all walks of life are facing similar decisions. As the blockade drags on - and it lasted for 900 days - desperation becomes more and more intense. Horses disappear - then family pets, even rats are killed for their meat. People begin to strip the bark from the trees to eat - lichen-covered stones are boiled for soup. Food becomes the currency of the city - and people are willing to do all sorts of things to obtain it.More than simply a picture of a horrible time, when so many people died and suffered, Elise Blackwell's novel is an incredibly moving portrait of humanity itself, a picture of what it truly means to be human and to be forced to make unthinkable decisions based on the need to survive. The thoughts and memories of the narrator - and the words and actions of those around him - paint moving images in delicate but sure strokes. An incredible amount of not only research, but sheer thought and contemplation went into the conception and creation of this book. It would be a stunning accomplishment by a seasoned writer - as a debut, it shimmers. This is a writer of great talent, soul and promise.

As a professional geneticist, I was initially interested in Blackwell's book as a potential literary document of the sociology of science, and was not disappointed in this. Perhaps few lay-people would approach a novel in this way, nor be aware of the geneticist Lysenko's role in Stalin's Soviet Union. Under Lysenko's direction, crop breeding and agriculture were analogous to Lamarck's belief that by cutting off the tails of mice, one would breed short-tailed mice-or in the soviet system adopted in China, the forcing of even western-trained scientists to inject blue dye into cotton plants in order to breed pre-colored cotton. But, Blackwell is immaculate in making the story true to the scientific climate in the Soviet Union at the time, in a way that appears effortless and does not distract from the drama. The author also captures the social climate of the time and place, and echoes of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag arose in my mind. It is simply remarkable and exceedingly rare to find a novel that has packed in, almost hidden modestly, historical fact and understanding. The same is true of the "seeds" and other botanical specimens in Hunger. When Blackwell blithely describes Babylonian plant use, or details the collecting trips of the unnamed protagonist, I believed it was just so.And I was not disappointed in the sociology of science ....changes in Science often take the form of "Revolutions," and though the ultimate acceptance of theories is based on knowledge and demonstrable fact, the road leading to final consensus is also paved with the lesser virtues of social standing in the community, ambition, and even greed, and when Vavilov is lead off that field.... Moreover, the political importance of Lysenkoism to the Soviet system should not be underestimated, and though far less extreme its reflected opposite in the US was social Darwinism, particularly the early use of "survival of the fitness" in justifying laissez faire capitalism, and the legacy of the robber barons. What is most fascinating to me about Hunger, is the way that biology and social and human insight are intertwined. It is simply remarkable, and one would think that Blackwell is both a novelist and trained biologist. In short, Hunger informs us a great deal about the field of Biology as the study of life, a shaper of society, and institutionalized in political power. These are things we should all be keenly aware of as this just-developing age of genomics, genetic modification, biological weapons and inevitably several forms of cloning reshape social consciousness, as for example in the debates on embryonic cloning, and become institutionalized, e.g., in the systematic collection and recording of DNA fingerprints. These things also force us to make unprecedented individual choices, such as a pre-parental choice for genetic screening of birth defects, and then what to do with that information. And, do you want to clone your cat or dog? Would you eat genetically unique seed

Author Elise Blackwell understands minimalism: offer a minute corner of an idea and allow that to engender volumes of information to the senses. HUNGER is a physically small (123 pages, and tiny pages at that) book that is a reflection of a botanist recalling the actualities of the Nazi seige of Leningrad (from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944), focusing on the winter of hunger ('41-'42) when thousands died from hunger and cold, resorting to cannabalism, stealing, murder, and prostitution as a means of survival. As a member of the Botanical Institute our narrator reveals his own stealing of the intitutes guarded seed, eating even a small portion that saved his life but could have saved the life of his wife had he shared.And here begins a series of memories about his life before the seige, about his infidelities to his wife, about the various exotic ports he visited in the name of science (and indulgence).And he shares his regrets, as he survives the seige and lives in New York years later in a house storing only unperishable food. "I told myself that pain was the price of life, its absence was the step into death."Author Blackwell shares her legacy of a rich exposure to botany and an eqally rich knowledge of fascinating places of history such as her often used metaphor of Babylon as a perecursor to Leningrad. She sets her visuals well: "...I saw a man on a stretcher, the left half of his head gone and stuffed with cotton wool, as if the the fabric could sort numbers, direct his limbs, feel pain, remember a beloved." And after the seige has ended and the people of Leningrad return to life, she places these words in the mouth of her botanist narrator: "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."This is a small book in size but the experience it engenders in the reader is mighty. A most impressive first novel from a writer well worth watching.

A book about people in extreme situations is always in danger of descending into melodrama or outright sensationalism. Elise Blackwell avoids this danger by employing two strategies: A prose style that avoids the merely decorative adjective, and a protagonist who is too true to be good."Hunger" reminds us that much of what we think of as humanity simply disappears when people are starving (as most people have for at least part of their lives throughout much of history). Yet it also reminds us that humanity is often at its most heroic when heroism consists of something as simple as behaving decently in the midst of barbarism.Reading this book brought to mind something that Bertrand Russell said about how the 20th century destroyed the comfortable optimism of 19th century thinkers that history was essentially the march of progress: "Our age calls for greater energy of belief than was needed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Imagine Goethe, Shelley and H.G. Wells confined for years in Buchenwald; how would they emerge? Obviously not as they went in . . . Most philosophers have more breath of outlook when adequately nourished than when driven mad by hunger, and it is by no means a general rule that intense suffering makes men wise."Blackwell's novel is short, because it's the right length for what she was aiming to accomplish. She succeeds in making a protagonist who is in many ways utterly unsympathetic someone we can understand as an example of what happens to a talented and admirable person who is placed in situations that tempt him beyond the limits of his virtue. It is worth considering in just what ways this same thing is happening to oneself.