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Review [published November 2002]
Andrey Kurkov: Death And The Penguin
Stephen Mitchelmore
This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt
plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality
of the foreground subject matter to make one
carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot
is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared,
that is, to the foreground.
Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives in a tenement
block in Kiev, capital of the relatively new nation of
Ukraine (not The Ukraine). Like many of us in the Deregulated
World, he doesn’t have a permanent job and
relies instead on contacts to bag the odd journalistic
assignment. There is a lot of time off. We join him as he
tries to make use of his empty time by writing fiction,
something he’s always dreamed of doing on a permanent
basis. He wants to escape the teasing ghostliness
of the short story and write what the real world thinks
is the real thing: a novel. Instead, he sits at his kitchen
table and writes another short story, later hawking it
around a few newspapers.
This might be the beginning of many other worthy,
socially accurate novels portraying post-Soviet economic
‘reform’. But Viktor has a saving grace for the
BUY Andrey Kurkov books online from and
reader: his pet Misha, the penguin of the title. Misha
came from an impoverished local zoo when they offered
its animals as pets to anyone who could provide
food for them. Viktor took the penguin because,
abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had
been feeling lonely: “But Misha brought his own kind
of loneliness”, we’re told, “and the result was … two
complementary lonelinesses”.
Misha’s presence in the novel is glorious. Whatever
Viktor does, Misha is somewhere in the background
asking for attention by not asking. We always want to
know what he’s doing, how he is, what he’s feeling.
Whenever we read of Viktor’s exploits, and they are
copious, we think of Misha standing somewhere in the
background, his emotions, if he has any, concealed by
his expressionless exterior. The only hint of an answer
comes when Viktor runs him a cold bath and he flops
into it happily, or when he is taken to a frozen lake during
the winter months and he disappears into a fishing
hole for ages, bewildering alcoholic fisherman when he
pops out again.
In my fictional experience, only Karenin in Kundera’s
310
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