Life of Insects [Hardcover]

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.

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.