Death and the Penguin was a hard book for me to get my head around, and I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about it. The basic premise of the story is this; Viktor is living in the Ukraine, has adopted a penguin from the zoo, named Misha, who lives with him in his one bedroomed apartment, and wants to be a writer. Eventually he gets offered a job writing “obelisks”, obituaries for the very much still alive and not exactly snow white VIPs of Ukrainian society. Rather predictably, this does not lead to a peaceful life for Viktor and, once his first obelisk is printed, he finds himself getting ever more deeply entangled in the affairs of both government and Mafia.

However, the relatively predictable plot of the first part of the book was, surprisingly, not one of the problems I had with Death and the Penguin. No, the main problem I had with the book was, in effect, the penguin. Don’t get me wrong, writing a depressed, insomniac penguin into a book is going to get my attention, at least for a while, and Misha is an attractive character. The problem is, he is pretty much the only one, and when a penguin is your only sympathetic character, you have a problem.

Viktor, who I imagine, as the main focalizer, the reader is meant to identify with, comes across as a one-dimensional character, and that dimension is a selfish, navel-gazing, and rather unappealing character. Added to this, Viktor seemingly takes no responsibility for his own actions. Even the advent of Misha into Viktor’s life seemingly came about as the result of a chance confluence of events, as the reader is told that

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely.

and that haphazard approach to decision making is what seems to drive all of the action in the book.

I may be sounding like I really hated this book, but that’s not exactly true. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, before Viktor really gets himself into trouble, and there are touches of humour throughout the book (which is the least you could expect, considering the book is touted as a black comedy). The trouble is, by the time I was halfway through the book, what had amused me to begin with had become somewhat repetitive, and the second half of the book was a little bit of a slog. However, the end of the book, for me, went some way towards redeeming the book for me, but I’m obviously not going to spoiler. Beyond this, there are some interesting characters on the periphery of the story, who could have been developed further, and who I wanted to know more about. Similarly, the scheme that Viktor finds himself embroiled in could have been developed in a different direction.

To be completely fair, however, looking at the ratings the book has received online, and the quotes that adorn the cover, a lot of people obviously had a very different reaction to Death and the Penguin, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that my reaction to the book was the right one. However, looking at those quotes does make me wonder if this is not one of those books that you either love or hate, and there is certainly nothing in Kurkov’s style of writing that I found objectionable.

In the end, then, I really do feel like I have to put my dislike of Death and the Penguin down to one single factor; Viktor. I don’t mind not liking a lead character, especially when you are not supposed to, but when a story hinges on the reader caring about what happens to that character the book is almost guaranteed to fall flat. With that in mind, I couldn’t honestly recommend Kurkov’s debut, but if you feel like you want to give Death and the Penguin a go, then, equally don’t let me stop you. Personally, I won’t be rushing out to get hold of another of Kurkov’s novels, and I certainly won’t be reading the sequel to this book, Penguin Lost, but I won’t entirely rule out reading another of his books at some point in the future.