Death and the Penguin
SynopsisPlot
Victor is depressed: his lover has dumped him, his short stories are too short, and the light has gone off in his dingy apartment. His only companion is Misha, the penguin he rescued from Kiev's Zoo, when it couldn't feed the animals anymore. Misha is the silent witness to Victor's despair, and joins in his celebration—fish and vodka—when Victor's luck seems to turn: he is commissioned to write obituaries. The weird thing is that the editor wants him to select subjects who are still alive, the movers and the shakers of the new, post-Communist society.
Story
About this book
Viktor, a struggling writer in post-Soviet Kyiv, shares his apartment with an unlikely companion: a penguin named Misha, adopted from the city zoo after it could no longer afford to feed its animals. Viktor's personal life is in poor shape. His girlfriend has left, his fiction goes nowhere, and his flat is cold and dim. Misha watches it all without comment.
A newspaper editor offers Viktor steady work writing obituaries, but the assignment has an odd condition. The subjects are not dead. They are prominent figures in Ukraine's new post-Communist order, and the obituaries are to be kept on file, ready for use when needed. Viktor accepts, glad for the income and the chance to see his writing in print. Before long, the subjects of his prepared obituaries begin dying, and Viktor realizes he has been pulled closer to something dangerous than a simple writing job should allow.
Andrey Kurkov sets his story in the Kyiv of the 1990s, a city adjusting to sudden economic and political change. The novel pairs dry, understated humor with a plot that grows steadily darker, using Viktor and his penguin as quiet observers of a society where power operates through arrangements most people never see.
