Andrey Kurkov: Death and the Penguin, a novel

Andrey Kurkov
Death and the Penguin



A Militia major is driving along when he sees a militiaman standing with a penguin.

'Take him to the zoo,' he orders.

Some time later the same major is driving along when he sees the militiaman still with the penguin.

'What have you been doing?' he asks.  'I said take him to the zoo.'

'We've been to the zoo, Comrade Major,' says the militiaman, 'and the circus.  And now we're going to the pictures.'"


This quotation begins the novel by Andrey Kurkov, titled Death and the Penguin.  Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer born in 1961.  This novel was published in 1996,  after Ukraine gained its freedom from the USSR.

The penguin is real.  Its name is Misha.  The main character is Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov, a Ukrainian writer living in Kiev, Ukraine.  He's not very successful, unfortunately.    About a year before the story begins, his girlfriend had left him and he was lonely.  He heard that the local zoo was giving away animals because they couldn't afford to feed them.  He went to the zoo and came home with a king penguin.

Now, he has just been offered a job as an obituarist for a newspaper.  An obituarist is one who writes obituaries for living people.  At first he simply reads the papers and selects those who appear regularly in news articles and the gossip columns.  Shortly afterwords, his editor hands him a list of his next subjects, and soon he doesn't have time to select those he will write about.  But, it really makes no difference to him.

Then something strange happens.  Suddenly, his obituaries become needed shortly after he writes them.  His subjects are dying, unexpectedly, most violently.  Is there any connection? 

Well,  Viktor  seems to be involved in a way in some criminal activity, but it's in a very peripheral way.  He prefers to remain ignorant of what might be going on behind the lists he gets from his editor. He's just doing his job.   But the real world keeps impinging on his attempts to remain in the background.

The back cover blurb calls it  "A masterful tale set in post-Soviet Kiev that's both darkly funny and ominous."   I would add quirky to that description.

There is a sequel, Penguin Lost,  which picks up shortly after the events of Death and the Penguin. I will read that for the further adventures of Misha the Penguin.