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Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov, Melville House; Reprint edition (June 7, 2011)
Review by Ann Snuggs
Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin, translated by George Bird, is fascinating.
Despite the slow-paced, passivity of the story - the structure reflects the life of the protagonist - it is mesmerizing, sucking the reader into the intrigue sans fast-action gun-battles, rapid chases, graphic sex, dead bodies splashing blood or any of the other popular ploys many modern novelists use to keep the pages turning.
If any bleak Russian novel might be called delightful, this is it. Not because the tale dances gleefully along, but for its steady, lyrical, introspective development. Like the penguin's owner, readers are swept up by a slow-moving but powerful current from which they are unable to extricate themselves. It is something to savor.
Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov writes. Unfortunately, his writing is not published. He dreams of novels but manages only to turn out short stories - short, short stories, as in one page in length.
Viktor's life is barren. Misha, the king penguin, shares his apartment. Misha came from the zoo, claimed by Viktor at a time when the Kiev zoo gave away animals it could no longer afford to feed. Companionship between man and creature is sparse, much of the time they are like the proverbial ships passing in the night. Still, something that breathes is living with him. Viktor is not totally alone in his loneliness.
Then comes an offer of work. Viktor left his latest story with an aging assistant editor in the arts department of the Capital News - despite the man's discouraging words - but the callback comes from the office of the editor-in-chief.
The editor sends a car, offers Viktor libations and praises his writing. Puzzling? Oh, yes. But even more puzzling is the offered job - writing obits, or obelisks, as the editor calls them.
Viktor is confused. His writing so highly praised to sit in an office and wait for people to die? Why would writing style matter?
However, that is not what the editor has in mind. He'll be writing obelisks for the living, for prominent people whose lives will deserve more than a standard line or two when they die. Viktor will be creating a file of vivid life stories to be run at the time of death. His one hesitation - these will be written under a pseudonym - for the time, A Group of Friends.
Viktor is gladdened by this good fortune. His pay will start at $300 a month and he will work at his own pace. He goes home to celebrate but has no vodka. At least he can treat Misha to a splash in the bathtub.
Despite his lack of recognition, Viktor's life soon seems to be going well. The work is easy and enjoyable. The money is more than enough for his needs. Fyodor in the crime section of the Capital News is providing him with information on his subjects so that he doesn't have to do so much research. Misha feeds on higher grade fish and is even affectionate at times.
Misha is splashing in a cold bath one night when the phone rings. The voice utilizes the editor-in-chief's name to request a meeting. The caller's name is Misha - non-penguin, of course. He requests a special obelisk for a friend. Viktor will be well-paid. The chief has no objection. Viktor takes the assignment. Misha-non-penguin is pleased with the work. He will order more.
Now Viktor's work is appearing regularly. When he writes the obelisks assigned by the chief, people die and his work is published.
Then the chief decides Viktor should make a trip to Kharkov to collect information. Sounds good but what about Misha? The penguin would be content to stay alone but . . . .
Remembering an old joke about a militiaman and a penguin he calls the district militiaman, one Sergey Fischbein-Stepanenko, who agrees to check on Misha during his absence.
Sergey becomes a friend. Misha-non-penguin leaves his young daughter Sonya in Viktor's care when he must leave. Sergey's niece Nina is hired to take care of Sonya. Viktor locates a dying penguinologist in his quest to learn more about Misha and becomes involved in that man's final days. Yet, despite the myriad of new connections, there is a lack of emotion in these relationships.
Death and the Penguin unfolds gradually, layer by layer, as Viktor is caught in a web of conspiracy. It has the aura of classic Russian literature. Readers will be enthralled by the bleak matter-of-fact tale of a morass of conspiracy and death. The very lack of passion is captivating.
On this site, from time to time, comments on what makes noir NOIR appear. This story lacks almost every element of the classic tenets of noir but its aura sets the door ajar for inclusion. Yet, while the story is dark, an undercurrent of dry humor flows through it.
It's hard to imagine any thoughtful reader who would not find something to appreciate in Death and the Penguin. It's a must-read for those who love good books of any classification.
Footnote on reading in translation:
A translator must have a well-written, finely crafted story to turn out a readable narration. However, a talented writer also desperately needs a skilled translator to maintain the quality of his work in its conversion to a non-native tongue. Hats off! Not only to Kurkov for this off-beat portrayal of a man - and his penguin - caught in a web of intrigue but also to George Bird for his lyrical transference of Russian to English.
Kudos all 'round.
FYI: The sequel to Death and the Penguin, Penguin Lost, will be released in September. May it be the same top-notch quality as the first penguin tale.
The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H Cook, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; (June 21, 2011)
Reviewed by Steve Anderson
Thomas Danforth has a lot to get off his chest, and he tells it to Paul Crane. As The Quest for Anna Klein begins, it’s 2001 in New York City — in the aftermath of 9/11. Crane, a young researcher, wants to take harsh vengeance on America’s enemies. The elderly Danforth can relate. He’s spent much of his ninety-plus years seeking his own brand of vengeance.
Danforth’s tale begins in 1939. He had traveled the world with his wealthy father and the young man now runs the family’s import business. He’s just the type to be recruited to provide cover for a fledgling American intelligence operation that will lead to the attempted assassination of a menacing tyrant named Adolf Hitler.
Danforth figures to stand squarely with the good guys, but the real world of espionage seems beyond him until he meets a secretive and beautiful young spy-in-training, Anna Klein. The mystery of Anna lures Danforth to break from his pampered life and join her on the dangerous mission within Germany to kill Hitler. It’s a thrilling time for Danforth, alone with the girl he believes will give him a more dangerous but fulfilling love and life. Then the attempt fails horribly and Danforth must flee, leaving Anna behind. She disappears, possibly into the dungeon of a Gestapo prison.
Danforth must find her. Throughout the war and beyond he embarks on a rabid and marathon quest that costs him nearly all. Anna might have been a double or even triple agent, he learns, and his pursuit takes him to postwar Europe and points East, a grim survey of the tragedies of twentieth-century Europe. In the Soviet Union he’s arrested and sent to a gulag for twelve years.
As more cruel questions confront Danforth, his search descends into an obsession with extracting vengeance at all costs. People have betrayed him. Could Anna have been at the heart of it all?
The best espionage and mystery novels are not about spies and plots and murders but about conflicted souls and the sorry truths they discover about the human condition. Quest offers fine glimpses of that, though the story may stall some readers looking for a fast-paced spy tale. The narrative framed with Crane creates many switches in time, the first third can be slow going as Danforth sets up his story, and it carries waves of foreboding and foreshadowing.
Sticking with Danforth will reward the reader. The last third moves faster and approaches the quality of espionage masters Le Carré, Furst and McCarry, yet with a profound style all its own. Author Thomas H. Cook knows when it’s time to unleash the raw story. He gives you no choice but to follow Danforth as he hurtles on through dark times that threaten to make him far from a savior and just another hopeless victim.
This is Cook’s first go at an espionage novel. It seems a unique angle for a spy story to have Danforth plow onward like a dogged and self-appointed detective, but it’s not unfamiliar territory for Cook, who has had a long and successful career writing crime and mystery novels. Cook received an Edgar award for his 1996 novel The Chatham School Affair. Six of his novels have been nominated for awards, including Red Leaves in 2006.
The way the story’s told might split some opinions, but few can deny the novel’s thoughtful and compelling lesson about vengeance.
SETUP ON FRONT STREET, by Mike Dennis (May 9, 2011)
Review by M. C. Pastoret
Meet Don Roy Doyle. He’s a 40 year-old Conch—a Key West native—“big and bullnecked… never the slim, honey-voiced guy with the right clothes or the slick red car… always the anonymous, faceless bouncer type…. The thing is, I’m probably a lot smarter than most of those red convertible-type guys.” Good with numbers and odds, and “weeding out the bullshit artists from the heavy hitters is no problem for me.” A life on the grift ultimately put him in the joint after his biggest con went sour, a diamond swindle with a major payday. He took the fall for his partner and spent three years in a Nevada prison. And now he’s out, ready to collect his score at last, back home in his beloved Key West.
Word gets out that he’s back, and that homecoming feeling doesn’t last long. He meets his partner, Sully, owner of the Keys’ hottest Irish bar and finds his payday laundered and tied up in “investments.” He runs into a cop named Ortega who’s got a decade-old grudge and would love nothing better than to violate Doyle’s parole and send him back to prison.
And then there’s Norma. “She wasn’t what you’d call a knockout. Hell, I guess you’d say she wasn’t even that good-looking,” but inside “she glowed like a warm summer sunset,” and “her smile was just the biggest and brightest thing I’d ever seen.” She’s the only woman who ever gave him a second look before he left the Keys for the West. Now he finds she’s turning tricks to pay the gambling debts of the corrupt mayor, BK—“Boy King”—son of the Keys’ ruling patriarch, Wilson J. Whitney. And Daddy doesn’t like Doyle interfering.
Worse is to come: couple days later, Sully turns up dead, the money vanishes, and Doyle’s been set up to take the fall. Ortega’s hungry to buy the setup. Whitney decides that Norma will pay for Doyle’s “disrespect.” And an eager FBI agent named Ryder turns up, wanting to know what Doyle can tell him about Whitney’s link to nothing less than the Russian mob. Even Ryder’s got a plan to make Doyle pay if he can’t get what he needs from him.
If timing is everything, then Doyle’s couldn’t be worse. It’s spring of 1991; the collapse of the Soviet Union has left a sucking vacuum in Cuba that’s pulling every atom of greed and ambition out of Key West in its direction. Everyone is waiting for The Beard to kick off, and everywhere Doyle turns, he sees the shadow of Wilson Whitney and the Russian mob. And each scheme he uncovers seems guaranteed to cost Doyle his freedom—or his life.
Doyle can’t—won’t—lose his freedom. “There’s nothing colder than prison concrete. The dark desolation…the tense friction. Hardened men scraping up against each other all the time. … Makes you think sometimes that you’re no better than any of those fucking animals in there.” Somehow he’s come out with a code of ethics, never spoken, just lived. His talk about prison life is brutal and full of ugly racial slurs, but he doesn’t care what skin you’re in if you do good work and keep the faith. He doesn’t mind breaking your fingers or slamming your head against a car door—if you deserve it, if you try to shank him, if that’s what it takes to protect Norma. But it’s all in the deserving. “We’re not murderers,” he tells his friend Shimmy; “we don’t do that shit.”
He does need help to beat the setup, and finds it in some old friends like Shimmy, his wheel man, and the wonderful Dr. Chicago, a Class A crib man. Some new friends, too—like Rita, BK’s underestimated, neglected wife: “Her smile was wicked, full of everything a woman was about.” Now that he’s back, she wouldn’t mind having Doyle wrapped around her finger (or her waist), but she wants something even more—a crack at taking her father-in-law down. Even Ryder, the FBI agent, becomes more of an ally than a threat. They’re all up against Whitney, patriarch in the John Huston mold whose got Key West under his thumb; his goons, Milton and Bradley (you’ve got to love those names); and the Russian thug Vasiliev.
As good as these characters are, the one we want more of in this story is Key West itself—the noir streets the tourists never see. Some of the most redolent scenes take place in Mambo’s, Doyle’s Old Town hangout: “Most of its small clientele usually operated on the wrong side of the law…. Because (Mambo) kept all the right palms greased, he did good business. The food was by far the tastiest Cuban fare in all of the keys, but we were the only ones who could get it. Citizen customers were discouraged from entering.” It’s at Mambo’s we learn that Cuba’s future has long since been mapped out by the Cubans themselves, giving Doyle what he needs to at least even up the odds against him. Mambo is a DeLima, and for a century and a half, “their interests penetrated into every segment of Key West life.” Not a bad family to know if you’re in Doyle’s guayabara. More time in Mambo’s would have been a treat. (If you can read about the picadillo and the yellow rice without wanting it right now, you are made of sterner stuff than I.)
Credit author Mike Dennis with no small achievement: he has taken a man to be reckoned with and a moment in time and turned these into a satisfying work of noir fiction. His writing is tight, to the point, like a line drawing; but he can throw in a scene to give depth and shading, even sensuality, as in the memory Doyle has of his mother cooling her neck with a cold glass of iced tea, breathing a moment of ease in her hard life with a low moan.
Dennis promises two more noir novels set in Key West. Judging by Setup on Front Street, we’ve got good stuff to look forward to.
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Michael--
Thanks for giving SETUP ON FRONT STREET the opportunity to be seen on this terrific site. I've posted a blog about it on my own website (http://mikedennisnoir.com) and added a permanent link to Noir Journal on my site as well.
Posted by: Mike Dennis | 08/15/2011 at 10:43 AM
I read Mike Dennis's SETUP ON FRONT STREET a couple of months ago and agree with everything you said. Great read.
Posted by: Dana King | 08/15/2011 at 10:15 PM
Thanks Mike D,
The pleasure was ours!
ML
Posted by: Mike L. | 08/16/2011 at 08:50 AM
Hey Dana,
It's been a long time!
Thanks for the comment.
ML
Posted by: Mike L. | 08/16/2011 at 08:52 AM