[.ca] Life Of Insects (ISBN 0571194052)

From Amazon.com:
Victor Pelevin has the sort of unbridled comedic imagination that can make most writers seem insipid by comparison. Born in 1962, the Russian writer has already published three story collections as well as a splendidly funny take on the Soviet space program, Omon Ra. From time to time his effects lurch out of control, yet Pelevin's manic level of invention tends to carry us along until he regains his equipoise. Certainly this is the case with The Life of Insects. This time, Pelevin sets his story in a sleazy Crimean resort town, where his characters eat, drink, make merry, make love... and turn into insects. This is no soft-focus allegory: the author is superbly specific about his entomological creations. "Arthur and Arnold had turned into small mosquitoes," he writes, "of that miserable hue of gray familiar from prerevolutionary village huts, a color that in its time had reduced many a Russian poet to tears." The sex scenes are a mite (as it were) much, though nothing more gruesome than you'd see in your average PBS documentary. Still, Pelevin's best trick is to makes his six-legged protagonists appear all too human. A self-doubting cicada, for example, finds himself envying the relative ease of an ant's life: "But he never dwelt on such comparisons, aware that once he stopped and began to compare himself with others, it would begin to seem that he had already achieved a great deal, and he would lose the sense of resentment toward life that was essential to continue his struggle." The Life of Insects is a black-comic Metamorphosis for the 1990s, minus Kafka's gravity and with an extra dose of Slavic neurosis. --William Davies

grotesque, pornograpic interactions between insects:
The Life of Insects, by Victor Pelevin, is a deep and depressing novel that looks right into the heart of present day Russian life. The characters are both man and insect in the disillusioned world that Pelevin has created. They morph between the two so subtly that the reader may find the plot confusing and hard to follow. Inside this brief novel, Pelevin has made each chapter a short story that involves a new character, though he sometimes reuses them later in another story. Each of the stories hint at how Russia is deteriorating in the post-soviet world, and I found that this gave me a rather glum view of humankind. The sex scenes were grotesque, pornographic interactions between insects. The drug use was portrayed as a desperate attempt to escape life, twisted so that the user was incinerating inside the joint. Mosquitoes took to Russian forest cologne like a drunk takes to alcohol leaving them bloated, nauseous and at rock bottom. The only reason I was able to trudge my way through this dense book was because I had to read it for school. I actually read two happy books in between to cheer myself up.

bug out!:
Drawing parallels between human daily existence with that of the insect world, Viktor Pelevin, connects this collection of short stories with recurring characters and themes. He beautifully turns the plot, settings, and the logic upside down to show us futility and grace of a single life.

Unique and challenging:
Pelevin, one of few prominent Russian modern writers, impressively creates a cast of characters that exist simultaneously as humans and insects. The transformations and comparisons are fascinating, as is the portrait of Russian life during perestroika. The book is heavily philosophical though and much of it is hard to comprehend. According to a Russian friend, "the only way to understand some of it is to smoke a joint, then read it."

The Life of Insects:
Pelevin's The Life of Insects is a stunning allegorical novel chronicling life in post-Soviet Russia. It masterfuly portrays the search for identity after the fall of the Soviet Union by taking the reader deep into the Russian soul and laying bare the Russian psyche.Its prosecution of Chernomyrdin's "Shock Therapy" and the pillaging of the Russian people by Western Business men and Russian Mafia is cleverly intimated. It is at times difficult to understand the full impact of some passages without knowledge of current Russian history but it is a truly beautiful novel, one of the best I have read. It is a truly Russian novel and I recommend it to all who possess even a superficial interest in Russia and the Russian people.

Brilliant and Imaginative Satire:
A translator's note at the beginning of Victor Pelevin's "The Life of Insects" states that "Mitya and Dima are both diminutive forms of the Russian name Dmitry." This struck me as an interesting and enigmatic note, standing starkly alone in the middle of the page immediately preceding the book's epigraph. As it turns out, Mitya and Dima are moths (or are they humans?) drawn to the light in one of the many episodes in Pelevin's remarkable and imaginative satire of life in modern Russia. As Mitya explains, "if I wrote a novel about insects, that's how I'd represent their life: a village by the sea, darkness, and a few lamps shining in the darkness above this repulsive dancing. But to fly to those lamps means . . . \odeath\c." "The Life of Insects" is the novel Mitya would have written. Set in an old resort hotel by the sea, the story begins with intrigue: Sam, an American, meeting two Russians, Arthur and Arnold, while a loudspeaker blares, first in English ("The Voice of God, Bliss, Idaho, U.S.A."), then in dreamy Ukrainian. The conversation among them immediately puzzles the reader, talk of hemoglobin, glucose, insecticides in the blood. "Sam looked around at his partners. Arthur and Arnold had turned into small mosquitoes of that miserable hue of gray familiar from prerevolutionary village huts, a color that in its time had reduced many a Russian poet to tears." Arthur and Arnold, the Russian mosquitoes, in turn looked enviously at Sam, an American, "a light chocolate color, with long elegant legs a small tight belly, and wings swept back like a jet plane's." From this first episode, I realized I was in for a wild imaginative ride, and Pelevin did not disappoint me. Weaving his story from chapter to chapter with stunning imagination and verve, "The Life of Insects" is an episodic narrative of many lives, all of them adumbrating ideas (from Ancient Egyptian religion to Buddhism to Marcus Aurelius) and biting satirical commentary on modern life in Russia and America. Appropriately described as a "satirical bestiary" by one reviewer, Pelevin's narrative tells not only of Sam, Arthur and Arnold, but also of a father and son, dung beetles, whose life is defined by the sphere of dung that they push along. "I know it's difficult to understand, but there simply isn't anything other than dung . . . and the purpose of life is to push it along in front of you." And there are Mitya and Dima, the moths, whose lives are dominated by the need to fly towards the light. And there is Marina, the pregnant female ant whose daughter, Natasha, decides to become a fly. As her mother watches, Natasha leaves her cocoon, "and instead of a modest ant's body, Marina saw a typical young fly in a short sexy dress with spangles." "The Life of Insects" is the work of a remarkable imagination, a biting satire that, at the same time, is laden with insightful reflection and commentary. I highly recommend it!