So many words apply. Quirky. Dry. Charming. Grimly existential. Deceptively simple. Funny. Bizarre. Sad. Engaging.
Granted, many of these words contradict each other.
But when a prison guard in Odessa starts writing children’s stories and then turns to adult mysteries—and they’re set in Russia and the counterpoint to their angst and violence is a pet penguin—categories dissolve.
Death and the Penguin is the first in the series. And Andrey Kurkov had me in the first few pages, when he, after introducing Misha the melancholic penguin (bought from a broke zoo in Moscow), he designated a second character “Misha-non-penguin” and referred to him thus throughout.
Kurkov’s sense of the absurd was honed in a world gone very wrong. His prose is spare, not cute; the penguin’s melancholy is genuine and contagious. There is a loneliness to the book that’s a whole new kind of noir: The main character’s hopes and delusions are pathetic, yet you root for him, held by the intrigue even though you don’t believe it.
The series doesn’t rely on classic whodunit or detective fiction conventions; it’s more like Kafka meets Italo Calvino meets Sacha Baron Cohen. Read it with no expectations. There’s a restrained intelligence at work here, a dark humor that slips ideas beneath the door.
There’s also an emperor penguin adopted by Melville House every time an indy bookstore sells 25 of Kurkov’s books—and Left Bank Books earned the first bird.
