Reviews for Death and the Penguin

The average rating for Death and the Penguin based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-12-19 00:00:00 Rick French Death and the Penguin is a sweet and strange little book. It won't admit it is sweet. Don't call me sweet! I'm so sad. Can't you see that I'm sad? It might say. I'm not sure how to review it without sounding like a weirdo. I liked it a lot and almost loved it. It was almost warm and it almost made me happy. I almost belonged there. It is bittersweet feeling like going to a funeral and looking around to see if anyone else showed up, like that would make a difference. If you were the sort to show up to other kids parties (kids you didn't know very well, or at all) just in case no one else showed up. Why are there no black veiled women in the back? What else is the measure of success? 'Penguin' reads like reading about strangers who you are worried for in case no one else is. Kind of. At least, until I wore out my welcome like those kids parties. This girl told me that she had her "real" party the next day and this was the one for me to go to. I began to feel a bit like that. Why can't I just say it dragged a bit, like a normal person? Or it is an obituary. Did Ashton Kutcher tweet about it or did he delegate to his missus? I'm not crazy. Viktor's job is writing obits. (He also goes to funerals. Not crazy.) Viktor is a forty something year old writer living in post soviet Ukraine. Okay, Viktor reminded me of my ex boyfriend in some not too comfortable ways (it was eerie. Right down to the pissing and moaning about how it wasn't sunny one day, as if that was something anyone else had control over). He's a writer too and he whines a whole lot about not having time to write when he doesn't write much when he does have time. Like it is anyone else's fault or you are stopping them from writing. Viktor whines about having to have a day job to pay the bills. Okay, I may be projecting the high level of douchiness onto Viktor. He was not as bad as my ex boyfriend. But still! I didn't warm to Viktor at all because of this similarity. Don't they know that everyone has to work and it isn't always something that makes us feel fulfilled? Suck it up, Vik! It was a weird place to want to tell Viktor that he was lucky to have a job and have food to put on the table when I had the feeling it was meant to be a situation for the reader to sympathize with him. He was sad. He was afraid to feel happy for what he had. I started to worry about the other people in his life, in case he wasn't appreciating them. There's only so much you can do if he's willfully blind, you know. Should I spoil the plot? There's mafia reasons behind the obits and missing bodies. I didn't care as much about this stuff. I didn't care at all about the forced penguin performances at funerals except to want to cry for Misha when he collapses after all of those funerals in the rain. Viktor should have stood up for him. Misha was a penguin in the zoo until he was a penguin in Viktor's apartment. I love Misha so much. I worried about him. I felt like I knew how he felt. He stared at the wall. I wanted to listen for his foot falls. I wanted to keep him company. Viktor was a tool whining about his sunny days. Misha was too hot! It was pretty brilliant the way that Kurkov wrote the worry here. Viktor was alone and Misha was alone. They had each other to notice they were there (at least on good days). Yet there had to be a push pull for Misha belonged in the cold and Viktor wanted the warmth. They weren't of a kind. They really are the terminal whiners dream couple. Who do you want to be with when you can't stand to declare yourself? When you don't know what you want? I admire Kurkov for writing this so well. Viktor and Misha have other friends of a kind in their lives. The kinds of friends who cannot step on your toes. Can you stop looking at your feet to see that they are unstepped on? Okay, I admit that Viktor would chase me away. I would leave the party. I don't want to step on his feet and I would hate for anyone to think I wanted to step on their feet. It was neat that Death and the Penguin made me feel like I could be there to do that. It was really too bad about the boring mafia plot that took over towards the end. There's a second book. I'm nervous about reading it. What if it makes me too worried about Misha that I can't stand it? I want to have hope that he'll get to swim in ice cold water and come back for a pat on the head, if he wants it. Fuck. I did that review thing where I only thought about the interpersonal relationships again. So the obits were pretty good and Viktor got a bit of an ego about them. (The obits are another way of trying to make amends for what they or someone else did. Worrying. In case something is too late.) They were about some pretty terrible people and he wrote about them in a humanistic way with some philosophy thrown in (all better than I make it sound. I'm not a writer). I was wondering how he would have written about some of the famous people who have recently died. For example, a certain dictator. (I bet he wouldn't have credited Steve Jobs with pixar either. Or painted Christopher Hitchens as a saint.) I also liked a whole lot that the former USSR was this bizarre world you couldn't figure out and so they don't try to. That was pretty good for not attempting to explain away why they would want to have someone write obits for people they wanted dead. Or give away penguins to civilians. Or any of it. It felt like the wall that Misha is always staring at. He doesn't look at the wall, really. What is there to see? It's there to lean towards and ignore. Pretty perfect for when you're trapped in some place that doesn't make sense and you know you don't belong there. Misha staring at the wall is the image from the book that stands out in my mind the most. I

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-01 00:00:00 Hershel Petty 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.