Pelevin pursues by seeing everyone as an insect, of insect kind depending on their human business. It's blackly funny but mostly disturbing.
The flap copy flaps on about how insect analogies are perfect for post-Soviet Russia, but I was equally reminded of 's "Stable Strategies for Middle Management", which is more likely to be a roman à clef for Microsoft.
On the whole, I preferred Pelevin's The Yellow Arrow, probably because I liked the narrative structure better. ...Insects is a series of nested braces with all the wierdness closing with the last brace; ...Arrow is a slippery slope tipping from oddity towards doom. Both structures are beautifully integrated with the subject matter.
ISBN: 0374186251
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack