Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Life of Insects

This was fiercely original and intriguing, but also boring and plotless, and even worse, convinced me that like a dim-witted person at a comedy club, I just wasn’t getting it and why are all these people laughing. You get a series of episodes, like short stories, about people who you then realise are insects, so that even though they’re wearing a slinky dress and high heels, they also fly and have a proboscis and wanna suck your blood, like a literal metaphor. This novel is a Satire About Post-Soviet Russia, so maybe not surprisingly mosquitos and dung beetles feature a lot. One insect blatantly says “We’ve been sold down the river, every one of us. Along with the rockets and the fleet. They’ve sucked us dry.” Okay, that was straightforward. But there was a lot of hoho Russian humour that went over my head.

He set the glasses on the grass, filled them to the brim, and raised his own.
“Whose is it?” inquired Arthur.
“It’s a cocktail,” answered Archibald. “Turkmenian second group and Moscow region engineer with negative rhesus factor. Cheers!”

Insect/humans (whatever they are) says stuff like “I killed the conceptual artist in myself long ago.”

Ah well, for me it was a miss but the more esoteric Goodreaders will love it.