Death and The Penguin

(This is my first book review)

Love to read?
Love penguin?
How about.....politics?
Clean-cut crime?
Good. This is for you.

(I always make this expression while reading.............sigh)

"Viktor is a lonely writer living in Kiev only with his adopted penguin, Misha, as a companion. Frustrated, until he found a new well-paid job as an obituaries writer. Working under a pseudoym, he left unrecognised by public as he did not just anyhow write people's obituaries -- he wrote obituaries of the VIPs; who aren't dead yet. Things were working just perfectly until Viktor found his work published for the first time. And one by one, the people whom had been written their obituaries by Viktor, died. The real intentions of his job got revealed little by little, and Viktor would soon know what his presence meant and how it decisively affected things and people around him."


And I said........ Dark and funny, witty as a proper novel should be, Death and The Penguin by Andrey Kurkov portrays a moving perspective of politics in Ukraine. This rich and well-built satire evokes image of fine and beautiful city with splodges sprinkling everywhere, a land of mafias where deaths of some livings are likely to be in soon-to-be waiting list. Yet in contrast, the relationship between Viktor and his unusual pet is somehow touching and beautiful, a combination of two interdependent creatures with different kind of loneliness, but they both seemed to see the same thing in each other's sight.


Rated A-