Much of the story accrued by accident or — if you believe in design more than I do — serendipitously. One day, I found a visiting friend (whom I guess I wasn’t feeding properly) hiding in the pantry eating dried pasta straight from a storage jar. This became an important image in my mind and, eventually, in the book. Another time I picked up a book while waiting for a friend and found myself reading Anna Akhmatova’s poems about Leningrad. I went on a trip to Central America and afterward learned that Vavilov and his associates had traveled not only there but to many of the places I had been in my life, including Mexico, the Southwest, and even my home state of Louisiana.
It was barely comprehensible to me that people could starve to death without eating anything they could get their hands on, so I began to think about a character who was unable to stand it. I imagined a man who was given to strong appetites, a man whose appetites, in combination with circumstances that leave him tragically compromised, exact a heavy price from him.
During the writing of the book, my physical setting seemed to mirror my story in some ways: collapsing and growing colder as I moved from a big house on a large piece of land in southern California to a small house on half an acre in northern California and later to a cramped apartment in the Northeast, where a few potted plants were all that was left of my gardening. Those moves, combined with my memories of more tropical travels, helped me get closer to my narrator than I would have otherwise been able to, helped me develop sympathy for him when my initial opinion of him was closer to disdain. This was an essential development for me to write the book in its final form.
Though I had nowhere to grow them outdoors, I still had many of the rare seeds I’d saved. I began to see the book in them. They inspired me of course, but they also influenced the novel’s form — my decision to write a series of fairly short, discrete sections, each capable of expansion but containing the essential germ. It is my hope that the novel’s meanings and emotional force accrete from section to section and that the sections interlace and echo so that the book’s ultimate statement or identity arises from the whole in such a way that the reader comes to an understanding that is somewhat different from the narrator’s conclusions.
Questions and topics for discussion
1. Not long after the siege begins, the scientists at the institute form a pact and agree to preserve the seeds at all costs. What is the narrator’s immediate response to this decision? How does this scene foreshadow subsequent events?
2. Describe the narrator’s relationship with his wife, Alena. What draws them to each other? How does the narrator see himself in comparison to his wife? Do his infidelities belie his claim to love her deeply, or do you believe his devotion to her remains separate from his sexual escapades?
3. In the novel, images of the devastation of the hunger winter are offset by equally vivid images of the narrator traveling to exotic locales, collecting specimens, and eating local foods. What insights into appetite and deprivation does the narrator gain from contrasting these experiences?
4. Alena is arrested for her role in the campaign to release the great director. What is the reaction of her husband and her colleagues to her decision to sign the letter? Given the risks, do you think her act was foolish or futile, or did she achieve something through this act of resistance?
5. Throughout the book, the narrator meditates on the nature of courage and cowardice and on the choice of those who survived the siege and those who did not. He says, “The bravery to survive is a ruthless one. Martyrdom leads, by its very definition, only to the cold ground” (page 34). Which do you believe is the braver choice? What do you think you would do in such a situation?
6. Several of the book’s female characters — Alena, Lidia, Efrosinia, Klavdiya — are strong personalities in their own right. How does the narrator view each of them — with admiration, with contempt? Why? Although these women are quite different from one another, do they have anything in common?
7. Babylon is a recurring theme throughout the novel. What do the images of this ancient civilization represent to the narrator? What is the significance of the epigraph by Paul Valéry at the beginning of the book?
8. At the end of the book, the narrator catalogs the contents of his pantry, including an unusual keepsake. What is the significance of this eclectic collection? Is his attitude at the end of the book one of regret, acceptance, bitterness, or something else?
9. Does the narrator change as a result of his experiences during the siege, or does he emerge much the same as before the war? Do you think suffering is always a wholly negative experience, or do you believe it can ennoble us? Does the reader come to an understanding that is deeper than, or at least different from, the narrator’s understanding?
10. Discuss the author’s choice of narrator. How might the story be different if it were told from the point of view of another character? Which other point of view would you most like to know about?
Elise Blackwell’s suggestions for further reading
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
The Plague by Albert Camus
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
The Book of Color by Julia Blackburn
The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman
Tracks by Louise Erdrich
World Like a Knife by Ellen Akins
Seven Japanese Tales by Junichiro Tanizaki
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A lyrical, haunting story about the cost of survival.”