Recommendations from the Kyiv Independent: ‘Death and the Penguin’ and ‘The Silver Bone,’ two books by Andrey Kurkov (Patreon)

Dear Kyiv Independent community members, 

This is Dominic Culverwell, business reporter at the Kyiv Independent, here to recommend two books to you: “Death and the Penguin” and “The Silver Bone." 

When I was last in the U.K., I was browsing the Ukrainian section in my local bookshop. Sadly, it is still minute compared to the swollen Russian section. But they did have a healthy selection of Andrey Kurkov’s books. Many of you have likely read “Grey Bees” (I haven’t, but my mum has), so I wanted to recommend the two novels I picked up: “Death and the Penguin” and “The Silver Bone.”“Death and the Penguin” was Kurkov’s breakthrough international hit and the first novel I read by him. It’s a sardonic window into ‘90s Kyiv and the dark underbelly of the exploding criminal world following struggling writer Viktor and his depressed pet penguin, Misha.His fortune changes when he lands a gig writing obituaries in a local newspaper, interviewing subjects to get to know them. But it soon becomes clear that there’s a mysterious group using his obituaries as a hit list. Eventually, Viktor clocks on to what is happening just in time before a stranger starts writing his obituary. Kurkov captures the prosaic struggle that many in Ukraine were burdened with in the post-Soviet years. His writing weighs us down with Viktor’s exhaustion and loneliness, mirrored in Misha, whom you will fall in love with and feel desperately sad for. “Death and the Penguin” blurs genres from crime to social satire, tiptoeing between kitchen sink realism and surrealism. “The Silver Bone,” on the other hand, is a more classic take on the historical detective genre with a dash of magical realism that takes us to 1919 Kyiv during the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution. I didn’t know much about Ukraine’s history during the revolution, since my school only taught us the Russian story (shocker), so I liked learning more about the prominent revolutionary and anti-revolutionary figures in Ukraine. The novel follows Samson, a newly orphaned young man navigating the warring streets of Kyiv after his father is murdered by bloodthirsty Cossacks who also lop off his ear. He joins the police force to earn a living in this new Soviet system, and stumbles into a brutal murder that he intends to solve. At the same time, two Red soldiers have been relocated to his apartment, and Samson’s severed ear, which he keeps in a box, picks up on their plot to murder him, too. “The Silver Bone” is a very different story from “Death and the Penguin,” but it retains Kurkov’s characteristic dark humor while capturing the fear and anxieties of the revolution that saw bandits and hooligans rule the streets. As someone who lives in Kyiv, and not far from Samson’s apartment, I loved being transported to another era and imagining Kurkov’s descriptions of this city a hundred years ago. But it made me think — when has Kyiv ever had it easy?!