In spare prose, Ukraine’s most famous novelist unsparingly examines the inhuman confusions of our modern times and the longing of the warm-hearted everyman that is Sergeyich for the rationality of the natural world. “Bees alone had managed to establish communism in their hives, thanks to their orderliness and labour,” Kurkov writes. “Ants, on the other hand, had only reached the stage of real, natural socialism; this was because they had nothing to produce, and so had merely mastered order and equality. But people? People had neither order nor equality.”
