MAN'S BEST FRIEND?

Death and the Penguin 
Vintage(2001 - English version)
Andrey Kurkov

How does one write a book review without ruining the story for everyone else? Let’s try... Over the festive period, I met an old work acquaintance in a bar. This expert in his field, it turns out, also writes obituaries for a well-known national newspaper. I was introduced to his chums and discovered that I had inadvertently gatecrashed an obituarists' Christmas Party.

On relaying this chance encounter to a contemporary colleague the following morning, I was informed of an eastern European book about an obituary writer and his pet penguin. Perplexed but intrigued, I stumbled across Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin - a Ukrainian tale about an obituary writer called Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov and his pet penguin.

There followed a fascinating tale of a not entirely likable, friendless and lonely man in his mid-forties living - no, existing - in post-Communist Ukraine as a newspaper’s ‘obelisk’ writer. By working from home - alone with a penguin he adopted from a financially burdened zoo a year before - Viktor ensures loneliness forebodes and analyses his every move.

‘A tragicomic masterpiece’ roars the Daily Telegraph on the cover. Perhaps. It is tragic. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book so lacking in human to human empathy, and yet Viktor’s relationship with the penguin - Misha - is a rapport of deep warmth.

With the majority of the story set across the frozen Ukrainian winter of 1996 and 1997, the human relationships are just as cold. As freezing, in fact, as a penguin’s natural habitat.

As for the writing, it’s really rather good. It’s sharp, quick and to the point. Whether this is down to Kurkov, or the translator whose name I can’t be bothered to look up, I don’t know. I suspect it’s Kurkov. I’ll probably know more when I gander over some other of his prose. Unfortunately, to know the actual answer, I would need to read a version of this book in the language of Ukraine, originally published in 1998.

Some of the prose is highly relevant almost 20 years after it was first scribed, especially for an idealistic communist such as I: “Today's battles were all for material gain, anyway. The crazy idealist was extinct - survived by the crazy pragmatist.”

Zolotaryov is a strange bloke. One who appears to choose a naïve existence to ensure that he shows no human emotion. His lack of true feeling is a quality one should not admire. Yet, there is something of this character - perhaps it is his loneliness - that is entirely lovable.

Actually, Viktor displays a massive desire not to get hurt, not to feel emotional pain, and loneliness is the best way - he feels - to achieve this. Viktor has clearly experienced emotional pain before the time in which Death and the Penguin is set. I understand this need to protect oneself, and it made me empathise with a man who tends to empathise with no one.

Death is all around Viktor: mainly through the nature of his work but pretty much in all other aspects of his life. His excursions are rare: a New Year holiday includes death; a hospital ward reeks of mortality; he unwillingly attends funerals; strangers, letters and phone calls bring it to his own home. Perhaps it is this reality of death - an acceptance of it, usually so hard for many people - that means Vik shows no outward love for the living.

But there is an unashamed love and care for Misha. As an animal owner (a hamster, a cat and a dog since you didn’t ask), I understand that unrequited love that an animal can offer. Or an unrequited contempt, commonly offered by Misha, and sometimes offered by my own pets.

Viktor is Death and the Penguin and Death and the Penguin is Viktor.

In all seriousness though, it is a book that reinvigorated my love of reading. One that shut off my earphones and dominated my commute. A read that captivates, and one that I highly recommend.

(And one last point - I do like the list of characters at the start).

As they might say in Ukraine, відмінно. 10/10.