Friday, September 04, 2009

SWANSEA BAY STYLE Book Review June 09

Death and the Penguin
by Andrey Kurkov
Vintage Books £7.99

Who would be a penguin in a bankrupt zoo? Our hero Viktor lives a lonely life in a two room flat with his penguin Misha, which he rescued from Kiev Zoo when they could no longer afford to feed the animals. Misha plays in a cold bath and enjoys his fresh frozen fish at the kitchen table.
“But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.” Add to this the grim realities of urban life in the post-Soviet confusion of the Ukraine and the mood is set for deep pathos, expressed by Kurkov in a dispassionate narrative style that spreads a feeling of hopelessness and dread throughout the novel.
When Viktor, an aspiring author, lands a well-paid job writing obituaries of notable people for the files of a daily newspaper, the two flatmates share a treat –vodka for Viktor, salmon for Misha. But soon the subjects of the obituaries have ‘accidents.’ They start dying off one by one, and suspicion and fear enter Viktor’s life. The leitmotif of the penguin’s gentle co-existence with Viktor’s growing terror adds a poignant counterpoint to the story.
Kurkov paints deeply memorable scenes of Misha being taken to swim in the frozen Dnieper river, of their flight to a dacha --- and of the fear and danger of life in a totalitarian police state.
Don’t borrow this book. Buy it. It’s very beguiling. It’s very profound .And it is a sad story that haunts you long after you should reasonably have forgotten it.

The Vintage pedigree
Vintage Books is the paperback section of publisher Alfred A Knopf founded in 1954. It is owned by Random House, now taken over by the giant German publisher Bertelsmann. Vintage UK was established in 1990. AS Byatt, Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami and VS Naipaul are among their Nobel and Booker prize-winning authors.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home