Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

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Victor Pelevin thinks we are strange. All of us. His new absurdist novel, The Life of Insects, conveys a sense that the world is inhabited by human beings who, whether they know it or not, lack direction because their society is irrational.

To emphasize the world’s peculiarity, Pelevin lets ambiguity reign throughout this work. The plot is loosely connected by the episodic pursuits of Sam, Arnold and Arthur, three entrepreneurs looking to exploit the possibilities for easy money in a new Russia. Only a few chapters actually deal with this group, however; the remaining sections of the novel portray the conflicts of several Russians whose attempts to construct their lives are frustrated by a lack of self-knowledge. In these subplots the characters’ conflicts represent universal concerns-the search for meaning and place in life-while their importance to the overarching plot is unclear for most of the narrative.

Even basic details, such as what the characters look like, are deliberately uncertain. The characters take on two primary forms: insect and human. Whether they are human, insect, insect-like humans, or human-like insects changes from sentence to sentence. For instance, when Sam is eating at a restaurant, he finds Natasha, a young insect-woman, on his plate, “sitting on the edge between the potato and the sauce-at first he’d taken her for a bit of dill.” In a short time, however, without explanation, she “put her glass on the table and moved her hands and arms as though stretching a chest expander.” Natasha’s gestures startle the reader, as do many other descriptions. Upon arriving on earth, a group of human-like flying ants descends on a boardwalk wearing “denim skirts, blouses from coop workshops, and red shoes with stiletto heels.”

The insect forms that Pelevin gives his human characters invite comparison to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Kafka transformed Gregor Samsa into a dung beetle to underscore a man’s defeat by an empty and futile life. Pelevin morphs his characters to show that they are prey to the world. As insects they encounter such perils as being swatted by a hand, chased by a bat, and smoked in a cigarette. While more active than Kafka’s beetle, these characters resemble him in that their limitations force them into disturbing circumstances.

The settings of Pelevin’s scenes are often unclear, contributing to the book’s intentional confusion. Locations are described sparingly; only the characters’ actions indicate where they are. Often they inhabit our human world, either conducting themselves as typical people or buzzing through rooms as insects. But in some scenes they live in underground burrows full of out-of-place everyday objects. For example, one character finds a window and installs it in his underground home. By revealing the characters’ forms and surroundings sporadically, Pelevin suggests that we are all small parts of strange worlds in which we allow our surroundings to define us.

While Pelevin expects us to feel as confused as his characters do, this effect becomes overplayed. Although the descriptions of their strange problems are necessary components of the novel, they usually devolve into long monologues by an omniscient narrator. The existence of this omniscient narrator seems to promise us total knowledge of what is happening, but that is exactly what is often missing from the book. When an insect swoops from one indistinguishable mound of dirt to another or changes form constantly without much explanation, we may feel only frustration.

In addition to addressing general themes of human struggle, The Life of Insects comments allegorically on the political volatility and undetermined development of contemporary Russia. The most striking embodiment of this internal turmoil is a male character named Mitya who encounters a female character named Dima, with whom he flies around Russia pursuing his true identity. Mitya and Dima, however, are both diminutive forms of the name Dmitry. Like Russia, legendarily divided between the East and the West, old and new, communist and capitalist, Mitya and Dima are looking for a way to resolve their dichotomy. Other characters are caught in generational conflicts-they are parents and children fighting over the course of the children’s lives, representing the tension between the majority of Russians alive today, who were raised under Communism, and the nation’s youth, who will need to seek out a new political philosophy.

Despite the heady allegory and absurdism of this book, Pelevin’s flare for outlandish humor makes the book highly readable. Timid he is not. At the end of a scene centered around two characters’ consumption of marijuana, Pelevin makes us wonder whether or not it is actually God who is smoking a joint. In another discussion that can be read as both serious commentary and black comedy, one insect recalls the horror of almost becoming the victim of DDT and other brutalities against her species. She pleads with her lover and asks him rhetorically if he knows “what it’s like when they sprinkle vitriol on a cesspool and it’s too late to fly away?”

Despite his minor failings, Victor Pelevin is an artist of enormous talent. The internal conflicts he creates represent both political and personal conflicts. By linking the two, he gives us a unique sense that we can grasp Russia’s complex situation by seeing its national conflicts as personal ones. The novel’s offbeat and challenging approach to politics and human nature makes The Life of Insects praiseworthy and certainly unique.