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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, and Balak in S.Y.
Agnon’s Only Yesterday do pet animals (in this case
both dogs) appear so accurately and memorably. However,
Misha is a suffering penguin: he has depression.
An elderly penguinologists, as he calls himself, tells
Viktor that Misha is superheated under his two layers
of fat, and nobody would be happy feeling like that,
would they? Viktor feels sorry for his pet but doesn’t
seem to make much effort to cheer him up except to ply
him with lots of seafood.
Misha remains in the background as most of the
novel is taken up with Viktor’s life. He gets a job writing
obituaries for the main Kiev newspaper. He makes
a name for himself with the philosophical flourishes
and elegiac, allusive nature of his obelisks, as he calls
them. His editor pays him well in US dollars. The plot
revolves around the behind-the-scenes ramifications of
these obituaries. This is also why we turn the pages,
though more in agitation than pleasure. We want to find
out what is going on and how it all works out.
In the meantime, and the meantime seems to last most
of the entire 227 pages, we live in Viktor’s world, full of
events suggesting something dark going on elsewhere,
waiting to spring into his life with violence, yet also
quite flat. A man, touchingly known to us as Misha-nonpenguin,
leaves his young daughter Sonya with Viktor
and then disappears. A man turns up and says he’s taking
Sonya away with him, but he soon disappears too,
BUY Andrey Kurkov books online from and
and then Viktor is hired by a mobster to attend funerals
with Misha at $1,000 a time. But nothing is revealed;
Viktor worries, relaxes, worries again. Time passes,
that’s all. A friendly militiaman offers Nina, his niece,
as Sonya’s nanny, and she promptly becomes Viktor’s
lover without, it seems, any passion passing between
them (that “complementary loneliness” again). Life
carries on as dully as usual and Viktor continues with
his obelisks at his kitchen table.
So what makes this such an amusing, affecting, readable
novel? Well, if Misha the penguin is so attractive
to us in his silence, mystery and apparent sadness, then
the “death” of the title is his abstract equal – standing
behind the action, waiting, inscrutable, not asking for
anything, yet preying on one’s mind (in fact, I’m told
that the Russian original means “Death of a Stranger”).
The pleasure it affords us as we read is the same pleasure
Viktor gets from his writing. It is an oddly comforting
voyeurism on life in general, a life which is elsewhere,
the subject of endless conjecture (the ‘plot’ we are all
in search of). We watch it all from the perspective of a
place where nothing happens – Viktor’s mind, the obituaries
he writes, this novel in particular and literature
in general. We watch it all with death and the penguin
blinking impassively in the corner, and we are oddly
moved. We don’t want it to end, no matter how plainly
written or routinely translated it is. It complements our
loneliness. �
311
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