Death and the Penguin Book

3.5 stars

There's a reason why satire isn't among the most popular literary genres. It has to be extremely well written and you need to be open to that type of humor for it to work. But if you do like that sort of thing, and if the author is someone you can trust to be funny without being (too) offensive, you're probably in for a great reading experience.

When the Kiev zoo suffers yet another budget cut, they start looking for people willing to take zoo animals as pets. Viktor, being a solitary and somewhat eccentric writer, chooses to adopt a penguin named Misha. Together, he and Misha move into a small apartment where they spend the next year struggling to make ends meet. Viktor occasionally sells a story to the newspaper, but there are months when they barely scrape by. So when the newspaper editor offers Viktor a strange, but intriguing and well paid job, he is quick to accept. What the editor needs is someone to write obituaries in advance, seeing as he was caught unprepared on more than one occasion. When someone famous dies, the newspaper needs to have a touching obituary ready for print. It is now Viktor's job to make a list of the most influential people, gather information about their lives, write an obituary and sign it with a vague 'A group of friends'.

"What we're after is a gifted obituarist, master of the succinct. Snappy, pithy, way-out stuff's the idea. You with me?" He looked hopefully at Viktor.
"Sit in an office, you mean, and wait for deaths?" Viktor asked warily, as if fearing to hear as much confirmed.
"No, of course not! Far more interesting and responsible than that. What you'd have to do is create, from scratch, an index of obelisk jobs - as we call obituaries - to include deputies and gangsters, down to the cultural scene - that sort of person - while they're still alive."

His job may not be something to write home about, but Viktor soon discovers that he excels at it. He is so good, in fact, that he starts getting requests from other clients as well. His only problem is that his works are not getting published since no one has actually died. But that is something a friend and client of his, Misha-non-penguin, might be willing to fix - even without Viktor's knowledge!

What could be the favorite pastime of a bored writer and his pet penguin with a depressive syndrome? That's easy - ice fishing! This entire novel is an orgy of absurdity. Nothing in it makes any sense at all! The only thing that makes sense is how much I enjoyed reading it and how much I'm looking forward to reading Penguin Lost.