Rating: 
Summary: Original, Gloomy, At Times Disgusting
Review: Pelevin is was born in 1962, if I remember correctly, and is now considered one of Russia's best writers by many authorities. One thing about his approach in general: Pelevin's characters are phantoms, they are just not there, not developed. I am sure that the author would make no apologies for this. That's just his style. So this is not Charles Dickens. Do not look for well fleshed out real-life characters here. It is all abstraction and imagery.Pelevin achieves some originality in this Kafkaesque, Chapek-like remix of insects like human beings allegory. I found this novella a bit too pessimistic, dark, and dismissive. According to Pelevin, everything is "dung." People of Russia are caught up in a life inside the filthiest toilet that has ever existed. That's how Pelevin sees things. I don't agree. Most characters, if this is an appropriate term for Pelevin's phantoms, are stereotypes, e.g. Sam, the American businessmen, Natasha, an adolescent Russian girl... I grew up in the Soviet Union. I think this maximalist attitude and go-for-the-gusto pessimism that Pelevin dispalys is somehow very Russian. It is rigid and uncompromising, and wrapped up in despair. It craves something drastic. A revolution perhaps, or maybe anarchy. I don't know.
Rating: 
Summary: The Life of Insects
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique and challenging
Review: Pelevin, one of few prominent Russian modern writers, impressively creates a cast of characters that exist simultaneously as humans and insects. The transformations and comparisons are fascinating, as is the portrait of Russian life during perestroika. The book is heavily philosophical though and much of it is hard to comprehend. According to a Russian friend, "the only way to understand some of it is to smoke a joint, then read it."
Rating:
Summary: Unique and challenging
Review: Pelevin, one of few prominent Russian modern writers, impressively creates a cast of characters that exist simultaneously as humans and insects. The transformations and comparisons are fascinating, as is the portrait of Russian life during perestroika. The book is heavily philosophical though and much of it is hard to comprehend. According to a Russian friend, "the only way to understand some of it is to smoke a joint, then read it."
Rating:
Summary: dysfunctional bugs
Review: The author had a clever idea, but was unable to think it through consistently. Within its frame, it could have been an adult book, as the story of Natasha and Sam show. The other part of it could have been a children's book (properly illustrated)to catch a child's imagination. As it is, the book is neither here nor there. Special thanks, however, have to go to the fabulous translation by Andrew Bromfield.
Rating: 
Summary: grotesque, pornograpic interactions between insects
Review: The Life of Insects, by Victor Pelevin, is a deep and depressing novel that looks right into the heart of present day Russian life. The characters are both man and insect in the disillusioned world that Pelevin has created. They morph between the two so subtly that the reader may find the plot confusing and hard to follow. Inside this brief novel, Pelevin has made each chapter a short story that involves a new character, though he sometimes reuses them later in another story. Each of the stories hint at how Russia is deteriorating in the post-soviet world, and I found that this gave me a rather glum view of humankind. The sex scenes were grotesque, pornographic interactions between insects. The drug use was portrayed as a desperate attempt to escape life, twisted so that the user was incinerating inside the joint. Mosquitoes took to Russian forest cologne like a drunk takes to alcohol leaving them bloated, nauseous and at rock bottom. The only reason I was able to trudge my way through this dense book was because I had to read it for school. I actually read two happy books in between to cheer myself up.
Rating:
Summary: The best writer to emerge out of modern Russia.
Review: This book, among with a couple of his others, is the most innovating and original work of literature to come out of new Russia populated by the new-Russians since Sorokin's "Norma". The closest comparison to it can be probably found in music by the likes of Nirvana and Kino.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read lately.
Review: To those unlucky who do not know Russian and miss a lot in the translation: the thought is great and execution is brilliant. Pelevein undoubtedly is a rising star in the new Russian literature sky.
Rating:
Summary: Shimmering Satire of Post-Perestroika Russia
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant and Thought-Provoking Work
Review: 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.
|
