Frozen Plaice in a Frozen Place

In Andrey Kurkov’s wonderful novel Death and the Penguin, a struggling Ukrainian writer, Viktor Zolotaryov, living in the early years of the post-Soviet age, finds a job writing the obituaries of the living.

There is nothing exceptionally strange about that. I was writing an obituary of the Queen before I knew that she was dead. But Viktor’s doomed subj…