Kurkov, Andrei 1961-

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KURKOV, Andrei 1961-

PERSONAL: Born 1961, in St. Petersburg, USSR (now Russia). Education: Attended Kieve Foreign Language Institute.

ADDRESSES: Home—Kiev, Russia. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 1003.

CAREER: Novelist, children's author, and screenwriter. Worked as a warden at Odessa Prison while serving in the military; worked as a journalist and film cameraman.

AWARDS, HONORS: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize finalist, Arts Council of England, 2002.

WRITINGS:

Death and the Penguin, translated by George Bird, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

Also author of three other novels, four children's books and several screenplays in Russian.

SIDELIGHTS: Death and the Penguin is the first novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov to be translated into English. Ostensibly a mystery, the book is actually a satirical look at life in post-Soviet Ukraine, with all of its corruption and its crumbling institutions. According to Ken Kalfus in the New York Times, while the novel "strains to succeed as a existential thriller, it does offer a striking portrait of post-Soviet alienation."

Set in the city of Kiev, the novel concerns the grim life of a man named Viktor, a lonely writer who adopts a penguin from a down-and-out zoo which can no longer care for its animals. The penguin, whom he names Mischa, serves as a kind of alter ego for Viktor since both are lonely residents of a world gone awry. Viktor abandons his literary ambitions when he gets a job writing advance obituaries for a newspaper dominated by Ukrainian Mafia figures. Viktor's suspicions are awakened when, one by one, the people whose obituaries he has written begin to die mysteriously.

Viktor is befriended by another character named Mischa (whom he dubs "Mischa non-penguin"), an associate of his editor and a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, Sonya. One night Mischa (the friend) leaves Sonya with Viktor, asking that he care for her. The nanny he hires, Nina, soon becomes involved with Viktor, but the two do not fall in love. Meanwhile, Viktor's job description has come to include attendance, with the penguin, at the funerals of all the people whose obituaries he has written.

When the penguin Mischa becomes ill, in what Gabriele Annan in the London Review of Books called "the surreal element . . . readers expect from a Ukrainian novel," he receives a heart transplant from a boy who has been killed in an auto accident. The doctors soon advise that Mischa be sent to Antarctica to recover. In the meantime, Viktor loses his job and, fearing for his life since his own obituary has been written, takes Mischa's ticket and goes to Antarctica himself.

Critics seemed both amused and intrigued by the bizarre plot and characters of Kurkov's novel. Kalfus said that "Kurkov writes with a light, deadpan tone in a style reminiscent of Donald Barthelme." He noted that the book is a "Hitchcockian" story "whose absurdities are meant to provoke Kurkov's readers to strive for something beyond mere endurance." In the Sunday Telegraph, Christopher Tayler wrote that Death and the Penguin is "part fable, part thriller and part political satire—one which paints a bleak picture of life in post-Communist Ukraine." Annan called attention to the "implausibilities" in the novel, but complimented Kurkov "for the sense of Kiev that it evokes: an agreeable city—more modern than one might imagine—only with black splodges of mafialand sprinkled over its map." Moreover, Annan said, "Kurkov writes about relationships which are friendly without being warm, let alone passionate; and they have an unexpected, quite unforeseeable matter-of-fact charm."

In a review in the Times Literary Supplement, Joanna Griffiths wrote that "the simple fabular style suggests a Russian-language tradition of horrors told ingenuously, as in the works of Daniil Kharms." Kurkov, she continued, "has written a successfully brooding novel, which creates an enduring sense of dismay and strangeness."