Customer Reviews

A Matter of Death and Life

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This surreal tale of a lonely man trying to find a way to occupy his time after his wife leaves him is filled with dark humor and characters so apathetic that they cease to be depressing and become enjoyable. As a devoted Kurkov fan, I was at first disappointed when I got this book and saw it was only 100 pages. However, the story is fully complete, and I found it lacking in neither plot nor descriptive detail. Readers of Kurkov's Death and the Penguin and its sequel, Penguin Lost, will find that some of the situations, characters, and events are familiar to them. But the use of first-person narration and the hints of insanity in the protagonist are more than enough to set this apart from the author's other works. If you're looking for light-hearted fluff, stay away. Otherwise, read this. It's worth it.

Great black humor. Small tale of a small man in a comedy of errors.
Kurkov celebrates the ordinariness of the absurd in a simple yet stark writing. The plot runs through somber to hilarious moments that won't let you leave the book until the last page. Intelligent and funny little gem.

Tolya lives in a one room flat in Kiev. He is unemployed, his marriage has ground to a halt and his wife is seeing another man. It is a cold, grey October, and a time of grim economic conditions and rampant inflation. Tolya decides on suicide.

His suicide will be different, though. He will hire a contract killer. Tolya will do his best to ensure that the killer is not caught. Then his death will be of enduring interest, forever remaining a mystery. Murdered, but by whom, and why?

A friend, Dima, says he knows of a willing hit-man. Tolya vaguely suggests to Dima that the victim is to be his wife's lover. Neither Dima nor the killer are to know that the victim will also be the client.

It seems like the perfect suicide. All Tolya has to do is drop an envelope containing a photograph of himself and a note of where he will be and when into a post office mail box. He is not even asked for money up front. He drops the envelope in the box and prepares to make the most of his remaining two and a half days.....

This novel is very short, yet still runs out of steam midway. The basic idea is highly original and filled with mind-boggling possibilities. However, once the story moves on from that it becomes rather mundane. Two male-female relationships that develop are completely unbelievable, contrasting sharply with Tolya's failed marriage, which is described in such realistic detail it hurts. The story concludes more or less happily, but is devalued through there being scarcely any acknowledgement of the very real moral problem overhanging the prospective future happiness.

Nevertheless, I am happy to have read the book. In part, that is because A Matter of Death and Life is an earlier work from Kurkov, who in his most recent novel to be translated into English, The Milkman in the Night, has arrived at the brink of greatness. It is also because of the originality of the contract killer/suicide idea; and because Kurkov has once again realistically described life as it really was for Kievan Ukrainians (for most, of course, subtracting the extreme absurdities of the main plot) at an actual point in post-Soviet history, in this case about 1995.

It's just a pity that Kurkov or his publisher thought a 22,000 word novelette a better idea than a short story of half that length.