The Life of Insects: A Novel (Paperback)

by Victor Pelevin (Author), Andrew Bromfield (Translator) "The main building of the old resort hotel, half hidden from view behind a screen of old poplars and cypresses, was an oppressive, gray structure..." (more)
Key Phrases: first beetle, big sphere, ugly bitch, Third World, Drummer's Fate, Magadan Ant (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Pelevin has a genuine gift for transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. In his previous novel, Omen Ra (LJ 6/1/96), the young author travestied the Soviet space program, suggesting that the entire project existed only on paper and in the depths of the Moscow subway system. His most recent satire is set in contemporary Russia at an ailing Black Sea resort inhabited by characters who appear to be insects invested with human personalities. The three main characters include two Russians and a visiting American, blood-suckers all, who are actually mosquitoes. As they fly about the resort bickering, preying, and eluding their predators, they encounter other insects who struggle with challenges both sacred and profane: building a burrow, raising a child as a single parent, finding the meaning of life. Viewed from Pelevin's unique, bug-eyed perspective, these conventional activities emerge as delightfully imaginative phenomena, humorous yet melancholy. Vivid description, a sure sense of irony, and inventive prose add up to an excellent parody of life in Russia today. Recommended for all literary collections.
-?Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (February 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140279725
• ISBN-13: 978-0140279726
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #761,867 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shimmering Satire of Post-Perestroika Russia, September 25, 2000

By A Customer

Victor Pelevin's The Life of Insects, a tale of the absurd, opens with one of many startling metamorphoses. Samuel Sacker, a hard-driving American businessman, is visiting a crumbling Black Sea resort hotel with two shabby Russian business contacts. The three would-be entrepreneurs are looking for ways to exploit possibilities for easy money in a new Russia.

After this trio coordinates its vague business strategy, they abruptly transform into mosquitoes. Sam is the luckiest...he becomes an impressive, agile brown creature, while the two Russians take on "that miserable hue of grey familiar from prerevolutionary village huts." Together they fly to a nearby town to have dinner, i.e., to suck the blood of the local residents. Sam, who refuses to listen to the warnings of his partners, becomes perilously drunk after sucking one man's cologne-slapped skin. So much so that on the return to the resort, he must suffer the consequences.

A shimmering satire of post-perestroika Russia, the characters in The Life of Insects metamorphose from human to insect to insect-like human to human-like insect from sentence to sentence, so seamlessly and frequently that the attributes of the different species appear more as transparent overlays than as fixed, distinct qualities. They are people and they are insects, and as such their actions can be viewed both literally and metaphorically.

In these fifteen loosely linked stories, Pelevin successfully walks a very delicate line: he simultaneously builds believable characters with real human struggles, matches their personality and personal quirks to vivid insect lives and spoofs various aspects of Russian culture and international literature.

There is Natasha, a naive, young greenbottle-fly prostitute who paints "the suckers on her hands" with lipstick, the better to seduce her prospects. When Sam is dining in a restaurant, he finds Natasha on his plate, "sitting on the edge between the potato and the sauce--at first he's taken her for a bit of dill." In a short time, however, she "put her glass on the table and moved her hands and arms as though stretching a chest expander."

And then there is Marina, a daft and dreamy ant who descends on a boardwalk wearing a denim skirt and red stiletto heels, craving a life out of romantic French movies, but instead suffering a bossy army-ant boyfriend, an unwanted pregnancy and a tragedy at a high-society ball that could rival anything in War and Peace.

There is the heart-rending coming-of-age story of a young dung beetle, initiated into the sacred rites of scarabs and their arcane Egyptian religion. There are hip, counterculture bugs who smoke marijuana ceaselessly while spouting paranoid religious and political theories. There is the cicada with an identity crisis; is he a cicada or is he a cockroach? Should he stop digging tunnels through the earth and become a computer programmer instead? Is life about struggle or pleasure? One insect even recalls the horror of almost becoming the victim of DDT and pleads with her lover to understand "what it's like when they sprinkle vitriol on a cesspool and it's too late to fly away."

Änd then there are Mitya (male), and Dima (female), two moths with wings "like a cloak of silver brocade," who ruminate in cryptic nonsense about their deadly attraction to bright lights. With Dima, Mitya flies around Russia seeking his true identity. Mitya and Dima, however, are both diminuatives of Dimitri, and, like Russia, they are divided between east and west, old and new, communist and capitalist, and forever looking for ways to end their dichotomy.

To emphasize the absurd, Pelevin lets ambiguity reign throughout. The plot is loosely woven around Sam and his partners, although only a few chapters are really devoted to this trio.

The settings, too, are often unclear. Locations are described sparingly and insects often inhabit the human world and vice versa. By revealing the characters' forms and surroundings sporadically, Pelevin suggests that we are all small parts of strange worlds in which we often mistakenly allow our surroundings to define us.

Pelevin expects us to feel just about as confused as his characters do. The book is narrated by an omniscient narrator, a seeming promise of total knowledge on completion. But total knowledge is exactly what is missing from this book, all to its credit, since life never offers us total knowledge anyway.

Although many may find similarities with Kafka's Metamorphosis, Pelevin's fictional universe is more reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Absurdly funny, inventive and playfully philosophical, The Life of Insects projects the complexities of human life onto the sparkling strangeness of the insect world with utter perfection.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If it wasn't for the translation..., May 1, 2000

By	Irina (omnipresent) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Life of Insects (Hardcover)

I must express my outrage with the utter lack of accuracy in the translation. I understand that no translation could possibly retain all the literary elements of the original text (I myself translate, amateurishly) however, that does not mean that the text must be deliberately mangled. In other words, this book MUST be read in Russian in order to truly appreaciate it's brilliance.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant and Imaginative Satire, March 20, 2001

By A Customer

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 . . . [death]."

"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!