Life of Insects (Paperback)

Viktor Pelevin

ISBN 10: 1899414207 / ISBN 13: 9781899414208

Published by Harbord Publishing Ltd, London, 1997

About this Item

Paperback. A darkly humorous novel set in a crumbling Black Sea resort, featuring a cast of characters who exist simultaneously as human beings (racketeers, mystics, drug addicts and prostitutes) and as insects. By the author of THE BLUE LANTERN and OMON RA. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781899414208

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Life of Insects (Paperback)
• Publisher: Harbord Publishing Ltd, London
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1899414207
• ISBN 13: 9781899414208
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

While discussing business prospects in the Crimea, a trio of investors from Russia and America suddenly morphs into mosquitoes searching for sucrose, in a disorienting novel that makes the purpose of life for insects a universal goal. Reprint.

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