This
might be the beginning of many other worthy, socially accurate novels portraying
post-Soviet economic "reform". But Viktor has a saving grace for the
reader: his pet Misha, the penguin of the title. Misha came from an impoverished
local zoo when they offered its animals as pets to anyone who could provide food
for them. Viktor took the penguin because, abandoned by his girlfriend the week
before, he had been feeling lonely: "But Misha brought his own kind of loneliness"
we're told "and the result was … two complementary lonelinesses".
Misha's presence in the novel is glorious. Whatever Viktor does, Misha is somewhere
in the background asking for attention by not asking. We always want to know what
he's doing, how he is, what he's feeling. Whenever we read of Viktor's exploits,
and they are copious, we think of Misha standing somewhere in the background,
his emotions, if he has any, concealed by his expressionless exterior. The only
hint of an answer comes when Viktor runs him a cold bath and he flops into it
happily, or when he is taken to a frozen lake during the winter months and he
disappears into a fishing hole for ages, bewildering alcoholic fisherman when
he pops out again. In my fictional experience, only Karenin in Kundera's The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Balak in SY Agnon's Only
Yesterday do pet animals (in this case both dogs) appear so accurately and
memorably. However, Misha is a suffering penguin: he has depression. An elderly
penguinologists, as he calls himself, tells Viktor that Misha is superheated under
his two layers of fat, and nobody would be happy feeling like that, would they?
Viktor feels sorry for his pet but doesn't seem to make much effort to cheer him
up except to ply him with lots of seafood.
Misha
remains in the background as most of the novel is taken up with Viktor's life.
He gets a job writing obituaries for the main Kiev newspaper. He makes a name
for himself with the philosophical flourishes and elegiac, allusive nature of
his obelisks, as he calls them. His editor pays him well in US dollars.
The plot revolves around the behind-the-scenes ramifications of these obituaries.
This is also why we turn the pages, though more in agitation than pleasure. We
want to find out what is going on and how it all works out. In the meantime, and
the meantime seems to last most of the entire 227 pages, we live in Viktor's world,
full of events suggesting something dark going on elsewhere, waiting to spring
into his life with violence, yet also quite flat. A man, touchingly known to us
as Misha-non-penguin, leaves his young daughter Sonya with Viktor and then disappears.
A man turns up and says he's taking Sonya away with him, but he soon disappears
too, and then Viktor is hired by a mobster to attend funerals with Misha at $1000
a time. But nothing is revealed; Viktor worries, relaxes, worries again. Time
passes, that's all. A friendly militiaman offers Nina, his niece, as Sonya's nanny,
and she promptly becomes Viktor's lover without, it seems, any passion passing
between them (that "complementary loneliness" again). Life carries on
as dully as usual and Viktor continues with his obelisks at his kitchen
table. So
what makes this such an amusing, affecting, readable novel? Well, if Misha the
penguin is so attractive to us in his silence, mystery and apparent sadness, then
the "death" of the title is his abstract equal - standing behind the
action, waiting, inscrutable, not asking for anything, yet preying on one's mind
(in fact, I'm told that the Russian original means "Death of a Stranger").
The pleasure it affords us as we read is the same pleasure Viktor gets from his
writing. It is an oddly comforting voyeurism on life in general, a life which
is elsewhere, the subject of endless conjecture (the "plot" we are all
in search of). We watch it all from the perspective of a place where nothing happens
- Viktor's mind, the obituaries he writes, this novel in particular and literature
in general. We watch it all with death and the penguin blinking impassively in
the corner, and we are oddly moved. We don't want it to end, no matter how plainly
written or routinely translated it is. It complements our loneliness.
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