Still Life with Insects

Originally published in 1989 by Ticknor & Fields, Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects is the intensely focused chronicle of Elwyn Farmer, an amateur entomologist, who uses the field notes of his insect sightings to examine and reweave the tattered fragments of his life. In a series of visually powerful and emotionally breathtaking vignettes Kiteley distills the transient beauty of the natural world and lays bare the suffering and joy of one man’s life from his maturity in the post-war years to very old age in the 19809’s. His striking narrative technique aptly captures the experience we all have as we struggle to make sense of what it means to be human in the face of the inevitable passage of time.