Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov can be found on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction 10 out of 10

 Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov can be found on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction

10 out of 10

 

 

The novel that ‘everyone must read’ has a fabulous start, where a major sees a militiaman with a penguin and he says take it to the zoo, but when they meet some time later and the militiamen is with the penguin, and the major asks what have you been doing, I said take it to the zoo and the answer is ‘we have been to the Zoo and then the circus, now we are going to the pictures…without spoiler alerts, let us just say that the ending is equally provocative, unexpected, both amusing and sad.

 

It always helps the reader enjoy the book more when he, she or they (as we may have to refer to others in the near future, taking into consideration those who are not binary, male or female and transition, are in between, etcetera) can identify with the hero or the main character and this is what happened to the under signed, who does not have such an exotic pet as a penguin, but he comes pretty close, with two macaws, Puccini and Balzac, who are playing behind right now and wait for our trip out to the ice ring.

There are other levels, beyond the pets and their symbolism, what they mean in one’s life and what they say about character, psychological issues (they take me to the end of my tether, especially Balzac on a regular basis) and many of us here, in Eastern Europe, share the experience of communism, the inheritance of corruption, police interference, descendants of the commies (Red Plague in our case, friends of Putin in theirs, those deposed in the Orange revolution) the ascendance of brutish, unscrupulous thugs and nouveaux riches that have gained their fortune through crimes and embezzlement.

 

We even shared a rather extravagant idea with the plot, where Viktor Alekseyevich, who is a failed writer (and there’s another aspect we have in common), gets a penguin from the zoo, which is giving away animals, since it cannot feed them anymore (and they also have electricity cut offs and whereas there are tycoons that have immense wealth (which is in fact the definition of the word) the population at large has a low standard of living and public institutions face shortages, on top of the despoliation that they suffer at the hands of officials that sell armament, everything they can on the side)

At one point in the narrative, Viktor gets one thousand dollars so that he takes Misha the penguin to the funerals of men (they are all male in the underworld) from the gangs, and the protagonist is reluctant, does not like the idea and accepts his fate only when he is told there is no choice really, he either goes ‘willingly’ or he will be forced to attend by other, much more violent means, and this is what I had thought of years back, not that we should be present at the interment of the clan of the Athletes or the other ones, but that given the Financial Crisis of 2008, when we thought that we may go hungry, I should offer to attend events with the macaws (there is even a Facebook page with the title Macaw and Borzoi Events, so that you can check the truth of what I am saying) and the borzois (there were five of them then) and charge the hosts, or else, offer to do advertising (eventually, Balzac has been in an ad for which we got five hundred dollars, about 40% of what we had paid for the big boy)

 

Viktor Alekseyevich lives with Misha the King penguin, for his girlfriend had left him the week before getting this extravagant, surrealist pet (it is obviously a metaphor and we have to think of that, I noticed there is no mention of the defecation, which must be quite a nuisance, given the food, the fish that the nice fellow eats, and he lives in a two room apartment for God’s sake) and everything changes when he presents a work at the office of Capital News and he is invited to join the team and write…obelisks.

An obelisk is an obituary and the way it works in this outré society – Ukraine has traits in common with our own land, but there are quite a few differences, EU, crime rate, which is higher over the border, and indeed, hit men were coming at one stage from over there, to do some murders on our side of the frontier – is Viktor gets files from his boss, the editor and has information from some other employee.

 

After a few weeks, a stranger comes and introduces himself as Misha, and he will be mentioned as Misha-non-penguin, since there is also Misha the pet, and the visitor wants an obelisk and then more, paying well, he figures the rate as double what a top prostitute (or in these politically correct, Woke societies – not Afghanistan surely – sex worker) would get and thus he will pay 500 dollars for an obelisk and there would be more orders, for various dubious, or outright criminal world sharks, a trend that would cause trouble.

Many are killed in Kiev and other places, the reporter in Kharkov that Viktor is supposed to meet is shot dead, and gang violence is added to political vendettas, the elimination of some underworld bosses by some secret units of the police or state security and some gruesome details will come to light, but when the obelisk writer asks the editor for some more information, the answer is ‘when you will know, you will no longer be needed and your existence will come to an end’ it is not a quote, words to that effect.

 

When Misha- non-penguin is in danger, threatened by the various factions of this internecine war, he brings his daughter Sonya to Viktor and tells him he has to defend her with his life, he will also put on the table a gun and a large amount of dollars in cash, about forty thousand…Viktor will employ a nanny, Nina, and he would eventually become intimate with the young woman, though much more physically than spiritually, the main problem of living in such societies being that individuals end up alienated, estranged, they distrust others, selfishness appears to be rampant (I see all around, of course, I am generous and kind, but not the others…to quote Anthony Quinn in Lawrence of Arabia…I am a river to my people)

Instead of advancing towards a happy end, which seems to be what a ‘normal’ comedy will conclude with, this sober, dark novel gets ever more funereal, with Misha-non-penguin and many others dead, the Penguin in critical condition, a situation that can only be improved with a heart transplant from a…five year old child, Viktor is targeted, under surveillance and apparently on the black list, after he discovers that obituaries worked as death row plans…