Review of Insect Dreams: The Half Life Of Gregor Samsa (Paperback)

When an imaginative and gifted author can use a giant roach as his main character, include a romance between the roach and a human, and still make you love him, he's accomplished a colossal feat.Yet these are only a few of Estrin's marvelous achievements in this thoughtful, but very playful, and often very funny chronicle of western history and thought from World War I through the dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II.Gregor Samsa, the famous salesman turned roach in Kafka's Metamorphosis, ends up not in Kafka's dustbin, but as part of a Viennese freak show run by Amadeus Hoffnung, in the opening chapter, "Tails of Hoffnung."

Reciting Rilke and discoursing on Spengler's Decline of the West, Gregor attracts the attention of writer Robert Musil, who tells him that although western humanity is finished, that "Society...is in a larval state.What it needs is a larval model to lead it onward, upward, and out of the corral," and Gregor is that larval model, his ironic task being to teach us what it means to be human.

In lighthearted, fast-paced prose, Estrin describes Gregor's emigration to New York, his search for identity, and his eventual connection to seminal events in western history and the people responsible for them.The music of Charles Ives, the Scopes trial (at which Gregor, ironically, testifies), the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the election and administration of FDR, and the development of the atomic bomb are just a few of Estrin's sensitively presented turning points of American history. At Eleanor Roosevelt's urging, Gregor accepts the offer to move into the White House, where he lives, literally, as part of the "kitchen cabinet" and works at the Department of Agriculture as an exterminator.

Extermination and the death of "others" are, in fact, strong themes throughout this novel, despite its playfulness, and an increasing gravity and darkness develop as the plot progresses. As Gregor, the king of otherness,shows us, the U.S., historically, has not been immune to prejudice, and he is remarkably critical of FDR for failing to take an early stand against the Holocaust when clear evidence was available to him. Still, this powerful book ends on a positive note, one which readers of this extraordinary tale will long remember--and, I suspect, share with their friends.Mary Whipple



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