The Life of Insects

by Victor Pelevin and Viktor Pelevin

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140279725
• ISBN13: 9780140279726
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 179 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

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.

Shimmering Satire of Post-Perestroika Russia

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

If it wasn't for the translation...

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.

An amazing book.

I was in a different world for two weeks after reading 'The Life of Insects.' Absolutely tremendous! However, I read it in Russian. I am not sure how well a translation into English would preserve and express the author's amazing command of the language and the style of Russian thought in general. The Russian way of thinking and of expression in literature have always been hard to translate into the Western, much more logical, style. However, I think a lot of Pelevin's images and ideas are universal. As a whole, if you can truely detach yourself and take the book as it is - going with its flow - I think you could receive great pleasure from reading it, both intellectually and spiritually. (Of course, if you are reading a good translation!) Pelevin is truely a master!

A Brilliant and Thought-Provoking Work

We're in the midst of a spate of bad novels involving dogs, ants, and apes who have been blessed with the gift of speech. Most of these suffer from a heavy-handedness, a portentous style that outweighs the book's content and the author's ability.Victor Pelevin is in a different league altogether. His ability is magnificent, his subject matter is immense, and he does it all with a light touch. The protagonists in "The Life of Insects" are neither insect nor human in the usual sense, but transcendant creatures who flicker back and forth between the two. The transitions are shocking, sometimes gruesome, and frequently funny, but never seem contrived. And why not? Despite our free will and our intellect, we humans too are subject to the full force of biology and social organization. We grow up, mate, find a niche in the established order, deal with catastrophe, and die. Along the way, we occasionally wonder about the meaning of it all. This may be a trite message, but in Pelevin's hands, it soars.