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The Life of Insects
 
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The Life of Insects (Paperback)

by Viktor Pelevin (Author), Andrew Bromfield (Translator)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber; New edition edition (19 April 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571194052
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571194056
  • Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 11.7 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 347,338 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

In a crumbling Soviet Black Sea resort, a motley cast of characters exist simultaneously as humans (racketeers, mystics, drug addicts, prostitutes) and as insects. A bitter yet humorous parable of contemporary Russia. (Kirkus UK)


Product Description

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.

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Sad, beautiful, satitic and surreal - WOW!, 15 Jul 1999
By A Customer
The pace and vitality of the prose alone should be enough to recommend this fantastic book, but there is so much more.

You have, from the outset, that unnerving sense that everything is not quite as it seems. Then, sure enough, the three characters you have just met fly off to an apartment block where they land on a window ledge before diving at a sleeping man's neck and sucking his blood. No, not vampire bats, but mosquitoes.

Later, we meet moth/humans, cockroach/humans, ant/humans - in fact, it seems that for every human level there is a corresponding insect. As a device, the insect world is a rich and creative metaphoric scythe which Pelevin yields masterfully, taking glancing blows at each of us as we're reduced to our insect role in the world. Some of us have our heads continually buried in the dirt, some fly blindly towards our destinies, others do nothing but work.

It is the way humans transform into insects that is most staggering though. Mostly without warning, but brilliantly woven into the particular situation as though the human/insect dual life were an everyday occurence, these transformations reveal the tenuousnous of the positions we rigidly occupy. In this way, the stories of insect transformation are strangely liberating, and yet at turns very sad as a careless hand flicking something annoying away from a face kills a mosquito, or a moth extinguished by the very fire it swarms towards confirms our transitory and rather arbritary existence.

What more can I say?

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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Life of Insects: This is not Kafka, 8 May 2001
By A Customer
This cannot be commended highly enough. Attempts at a description of the storylines would do them no real justice. The feeling of Zen mysticism pervades the book and seems to pull together the surreal fairytale universe it creates from the aftermathn of the Soviet collapse. Just buy it. Then buy the Clay machine Gun.
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