While playing chess and drinking vodka the two men will come so close to each other that the latter will trust the former with a very serious and kind of mysterious mission, and he’ll also offer him the means to see it through. During the journey he becomes a very good friend with a mysterious man called Stanislav Bronikovsky, a man who’s very sure, and afraid, that someone’s following him. For Viktor, it is both a quest and an odyssey of atonement for the reader, an experience as rich, topical and black-humouredly illuminating as Death and the Penguin.In Penguin Lost we follow the most recent adventures of Viktor the writer and Misha the penguin, whom we’ve first met in Death and the Penguin.Īndrey Kurkov does in this book exactly what he did in the previews one: he throws his hero into the most extreme and extravagant situations and using black humor as his weapon of choice he once again comes to describe the world as it came to be after the fall of the Soviet Union.Īt the beginning of the novel we meet Viktor onboard a big ship heading for Antarctica, where he’s supposed to settle in a research facility.

Viktor helps in his campaign, and is rewarded with introductions to those able to further his desperate search for Misha, said to be in the zoo of the murderous Chechen Khachayev. He is first interrogated and then befriended by a Mafia boss who, while burying his contract-killed son-in-law, is also running for election as People's Deputy. Visiting, on his return to Kiev, Penguinologist Pidpaly's grave, Viktor mistakes an elusive child in white shirt and black shorts for Misha on funeral duty. Now, in Penguin Lost, we join Viktor for his brief stay in and escape from Antarctica to discover that, characteristically, he has fallen on his feet. Meanwhile, Penguin Misha was left abandoned in a clinic recovering from a heart transplant.

When last we saw Viktor, in the final pages of Death and the Penguin, he was taking his seat aboard the Expedition to Antarctica plane, fearing for his life.

Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov