The novel Death and the Penguin contains 91 short, numbered chapters or sections that are not grouped into parts and do not have titles.

“Life was a road, and if departed from at a tangent, the longer for it. And a long road was a long life – a case where to travel was better than to arrive, the point of arrival being, after all, always the same: death.”

“Longevity depended on peace. Peace was the source of self-assurance, and self-assurance allowed one to cleanse one’s life of needless upsets, twists and turns.”

“The once terrible was now commonplace, meaning that people accepted it as the norm and went on living, instead of getting needlessly agitated.”

“The full story is what you get told only if and when your work, and with it your existence, are no longer required.”

“To every time, its own normality.”

1

First a stone fell a meter from his foot. Viktor looked back—two men were grinning at him. One of them, standing by the dismantled cobblestone pavement, bent down, picked up another cobblestone, and, as if playing skittles, rolled the stone in his direction. Viktor shot forward and rounded the corner at a fast walk, barely distinguishable from power-walking. “The main thing is not to run!” he kept telling himself.

He stopped outside his building. He glanced at the street clock hanging there—nine in the evening. Quiet and deserted. He went into the entrance. Now he was no longer afraid. Ordinary people are simply bored with life; entertainment is too expensive for them now. That’s why the cobblestones are rolling.

It was evening. The kitchen. Darkness. The electricity had simply been cut off and the light was out. In the darkness, the unhurried steps of Misha the penguin could be heard—he had appeared at Viktor’s place a year ago in the autumn, when the zoo was giving away hungry animals to anyone who could feed them. Viktor went and brought back a king penguin. His girlfriend had left him the week before. He had been lonely, but Misha the penguin brought his own kind of loneliness, and now the two lonelinesses simply complemented each other, creating an impression more of interdependence than of friendship.

Viktor found a candle, lit it, and placed it in a mayonnaise jar on the table. The poetic carelessness of the tiny light made him search in the semi-darkness for a pen and paper. He sat down at the table, the sheet of paper between him and the candle. This sheet needed to be filled with something. If Viktor were a poet, rhymed lines would race across the white sheet, but he was not a poet. He was a man of letters, stuck between journalism and short prose. The most successful thing he produced were short stories. Very short ones. So short that even if he were paid for them, he couldn’t make a living.

A shot rang out on the street. Viktor flinched, pressed himself against the window, behind which nothing could be seen, then returned to the sheet of paper. His imagination had already invented a story around that shot. The story took up a single page—no more, no less. As the tragic final notes of the fresh short story played out, the electricity came back on. The lamp hanging from the ceiling flared up. Viktor blew out the candle. He took frozen pollock out of the freezer and put it in Misha’s bowl.