Death and the Penguin

"War and books are incompatible,” decided Andrey Kurkov, one month into Putin’s war against Ukraine. Reading his Diary of an Invasion, it’s not hard to see why he thinks so. Homes are evacuated; air raid sirens go off day and night. You get shelled. There is a never-ending cascade of bad news: about friends, about war crimes, about the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The loss of luxuries. No tonic water, no whiskey-and-soda. There isn’t much time to think. Kurkov’s book came to the attention of the West when it was published in the UK last September. Since then, it has emerged as one of the first serious works of literature to come out of Ukraine since the invasion.

"They don’t treat people nowadays, let alone penguins.” When Americans ask what went wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this wry comment on the state of Ukrainian healthcare in the 1990s isn’t a bad place to start. It’s also typical of the darkly funny Death and the Penguin, an account of a young writer in Kiev and his pet penguin, Misha, formerly of the city zoo. Did I say Kiev? Of course I meant Kyiv. It has lately become unfashionable to mention the commonalities between Ukraine and Russia, lest you give aid and succor to Vladimir Putin. But Putin’s propaganda resonates because it contains a grain of truth. Despite war and ethnic conflict, Russia and Ukraine have a great deal of shared history.