Death and the Penguin

The penguin is named Misha. He eats frozen king prawns and sleeps standing up. The Penguinologist asked Viktor - the failed novelist - why the zoo gave him a sick penguin.

Sick? Vickor asks. Yes, he has depression. Misha likes to stare at his own reflection in the mirror.

"Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity."

Audrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin is a satirical thriller - a post-soviet chronicle of alienation and corruption. And strangely it makes me feel love a bit. Is that good literature?