Insect DreamsReviews

The Wound That Will Not Heal

Sat, 1 Jun 2002 21:04:04 -0400

Source: World and I, June 2002 v17 i6 p246.

Title: The Wound That Will Not Heal - European modernism's darkest figure of exile and dehumanization is back but with a powerfully affirmative subtext: the possibility of authenticity, newness, and transformation.(Insect Dreams: the Half-Life of Gregor Samsa)_(book review)
Author: STEVE DOWDEN

Subjects: Books - Reviews
People: Estrin, Marc
Nmd Works: Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (Book) - Reviews

Electronic Collection: A87868547
RN: A87868547

Full Text COPYRIGHT 2002 News World Communications, Inc.

Steve Dowden chairs the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Brandeis University. He is the author of books and essays on modern German literature and most recently has coedited a collection of essays entitled German Literature, Jewish Critics, which will be published in August.
Book Info:INSECT DREAMS
The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa
Marc Estrin
Publisher:New York: Blue Hen Books, 2002
469 pp., $26.95

Inventive, puckish Marc Estrin has produced a novel--a first novel, as it happens--that stands apart from business as usual in contemporary fiction. Insect Dreams is a historical tale of sorts, exploring events and ideas from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second. What sets it apart is the special angle of vision from which the story unfolds: his protagonist is a roach, Gregor Samsa of Prague.

Gregor's original home was Kafka's long story The Metamorphosis, first published in German in 1915. In it a young traveling salesman awakens from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a verminous insect of some sort, a roach or a beetle. Exactly what manner of beast Kafka's creature might
be has never been known, but Estrin has generously cleared up the puzzlement. We learn with certainty that Gregor is a cockroach who stands at about five foot six. Moreover, we learn with relief that he has survived the maltreatment his family dealt him.

Kafka's readers have long supposed him dead, his carcass swept out with the garbage by his parents' odious cleaning woman. Miraculously, Gregor has survived those traumatic times. Still, as Faulkner once pointed out, the past is never dead; it's never even past. Gregor carries the past with him. It is lodged permanently in his back and oozes brown fluids, a souvenir of fatherly authority. His own dad threw an apple at him in anger, administering a wound that will not heal.

The father's side of the story is not hard to understand. Gregor was quite an embarrassment to the family and a nuisance to have around the house. Worse still, the transformation cost him his job and its income to the family. Small wonder his father lost his temper. What father would be pleased with a son who grows up to be a shiftless parasite, lounging all day, every day, alone in his room? Such a son plainly lacks not only ambition but a proper sense of responsibility. (Kafka's sense of humor remains underappreciated, but Estrin has a fine sense of it.)

The novel dwells on Gregor's injury, which afflicts him at crucial moments in the action. The wound inflicted by that apple--ancient emblem of guilty knowledge vis-a-vis an all-powerful Father-- accompanies the roach throughout his new wanderings in Vienna during the time of Hitler's ascendancy and then
in the United States during the Depression and Second World War.

The gift of transformation

Estrin's Gregor is a roach strongly drawn to figures of paternal authority. Though none is as nasty as his true father, each relationship is ambivalent. The father who returns him to life is Amadeus Hoffnung, an eccentric Viennese collector of oddities. His "Wunderkammer" becomes so expansive that he begins
charging admission. Soon human curiosities find their way to him, and his curiosity cabinet becomes a freak show. Gregor is nothing if not a curiosity of nature and so rapidly becomes a star attraction in the Tails of Hoffnung Circus, his freaks being the "tailings" of humanity.

Hoffnung is the most benevolent of the father figures. He is exploiting Gregor, but under his tutelage Gregor becomes not only a celebrity but a public intellectual, hobnobbing with Robert Musil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other Viennese heroes of the contemplative life. Gregor gradually develops a sense of mission for himself in the twentieth century. He has learned from
Hoffnung--whose name means "hope"--and from talking with Musil that his otherness should be regarded as a gift: he is an original in a world of mass duplicates. He is privileged to stand apart from the common run of modern humanity, and his unique perspective makes it possible to see the world in a fresh, critical, and hopeful way.

In an otherwise gloomy discussion of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Musil informs Gregor that he is the hope of modern man:
""Cockroaches, you surely know, demonstrate incomplete metamorphosis. You are as larval as you can be, not wormlike, but comparatively larval nonetheless."

""And so, unlike Western humanity, which both you and your friend Professor Spengler might agree is 'finished,' you, Herr Cockroach, are unfinished. . ..""

""Like the Art of the Fugue," observed Amadeus."

Now, this is indeed an arresting thought and one that is certifiably Viennese. Yet the thinker most associated with it does not appear in the novel. Musil's friend and admirer, Elias Canetti, famously argued that the problem with modernity is that human beings have lost the ability to transform themselves.
According to Canetti, great writers are the "guardians of transformation," and for him Kafka was among the greatest of writers. Estrin's Gregor Samsa plainly embodies what Canetti referred to as "the gift of transformation."

"We don't need you to go back," Musil assures Gregor. "We need you to go forward from the larval state, from a unique place which carries the capacity for real change." Musil clarifies Gregor's mission for him. He is a pest and must make the most of it. He must act as a gadfly, not unlike Socrates, and do
what he can to help midwife transformation in the world. It will be Gregor's task to bug some important people.

Bugs in dark times

Adolf Hitler is one figure of paternal authority that Gregor easily resists. Apart from being a cockroach, which not everybody holds again him, Gregor is also Jewish in an anti-Semitic society. Like most important Viennese intellectuals, he emigrates. He makes his way to New York City, where he finds a job as an elevator operator. Here he meets Alice Paul, the feminist activist, and Charles Ives, the insurance executive and composer.

Alice initiates Gregor into American life, both intellectually and erotically. Through her he learns about life for women in Depression- era America, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and other momentous events of the era. He shares her social sympathies, and he falls hard for Alice. For her part, she is unprejudiced and open to love between species, but there are limits. Their one
attempt at lovemaking brings disappointment and sorrow, driving the frustrated blattid briefly to consider plastic surgery. Estrin, evidently a man of sunny disposition, tends to look on the bright side: "The one good thing that could be said was that they did not have to worry about birth control." But in the end Alice, too, must inflict a lasting wound on poor Gregor. She has her calling, and he must remain true to his own. And besides, how could any erotic liaison between a normal, healthy woman and a large insect work out? Alas, it cannot. Alice breaks Gregor's heart but not without educating it first.

Charles Ives, another emphatically American figure, offers Gregor an education of another sort. He takes Gregor and Alice to a baseball game and explains the American mind to them: "Kill the ump!" Ives continued. "We don't like transcendent authority. We want to make and interpret the rules. So the ump is the perfect target. He embodies the rules, and enforces them." He may as well be talking about his technique as a composer or Estrin's as a novelist.

Like Kafka, Ives was an insurance man by day and an artist by night, a composer of highly original music. Estrin, who according to the dust jacket is a cellist, weaves some of his finest passages around the idea of music and art. In chapters strongly reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Estrin explores works real and imaginary by Ives. His "Insect Sonata" was composed as a gift for Gregor, because this living embodiment of the possibility of self-transformation restored Ives at a time when he was mired in self-doubt and depression.

Estrin's lengthy description of the piece's first performance, like Mann's virtuoso descriptions of Adrian Leverkuhn's imaginary works, is highly engaging and even stirring. The pianist Nicolas Slonimsky, known for his audacious avant-gardism, performs the premiere:

"This was Slonimsky's singing debut, for when are concert pianists ever asked to sing? "For God!" he bellowed out, "is glorified in man," a line from Browning's long dramatic poem Paracelsus. As Beethoven had needed the human voice to bring the Ninth to culmination, so Ives had transcended the limits of
the piano sonata. Some wonderful singer might have been engaged to enter here, as a flute player does at the end of the Concord Sonata, but no. Ives specifically notates "No helpers allowed!" as if to demand that the performer demonstrate--in his or her own person--the ability to metamorphose and transcend."

For God is glorified in man

Ives takes Gregor on as a "risk assessor" in his insurance gency. Through connections he makes there, he gradually ascends to the White House, as an adviser to FDR, and from there to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. In Roosevelt and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Gregor meets two new father figures. He takes it on himself to warn the president about Hitler and the murderous
activities of Himmler's SS. He is also moved by the plight of the American Japanese in California, who are being herded into concentration camps. Gregor can be relied upon to see the point of view of those in exile, those who look different, those oppressed by the wielders of power. Roosevelt, though willing
to hear him out, stays on his own politically expedient course.

Gregor is particularly moved by the ritual suicide of a young American whom he meets by chance on the streets of Washington, D.C. Josh Miyaguchi sets himself ablaze on the steps of the Capitol in protest of the "relocation" of the Japanese. The scene is brief but pivotal, for it anticipates and sets the tone
for the conclusion, which is as surprising as it is inevitable. With the passing of Roosevelt, Gregor moves to Los Alamos, still in his capacity as risk assessor, seeking to irritate and advise Oppenheimer and his colleagues at the Manhattan Project. Gregor does his best to speed the creation of the atomic bomb.

The conclusion of Estrin's tale is best left obscure. Let it be said only that it turns on the novel's central themes of knowledge and guilt, transformation and transcendence, themes that engage Oppenheimer as deeply as they do Josh Miyaguchi or Gregor Samsa.

Transformation and transcendence

An epilogue is appended to the novel proper. It is presented by Rudolph Bernard, M.D., a fictional mask for the novelist. He offers some comments and observations on Gregor's story, presenting him as a figure related to Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Till Eulenspiegel. Since Estrin has taken the trouble to invite such comparisons, it may be worthwhile to ponder them.

How does Gregor resemble Don Quixote, who reimagines the world to suit himself? Or Don Juan, who defies the moral order as a matter of will and desire? Or Till Eulenspiegel, the trickster who delights in transforming order into chaos? The common denominator must be this: each refuses to accept the world as it is. And none of them actually succeeds in changing it.

Some similar thought appears to underlie Estrin's aesthetic as a novelist. Convention and rigidity are under attack. His storytelling-- loose and expansive, historical and imagined, funny and sad--is a seriously ambitious work of art as well as a fine entertainment. One senses a moral urgency in his writing, yet this urgency never collapses into a "message" that he is trying
to put across.

Witold Gombrowicz, a novelist with a disposition similar to Estrin's, once wrote that "the purpose of literature is not to solve problems but to set them." Despite the messianic overtones of Gregor's mission, Estrin's ethic in Insect Dreams is not founded on asserting positions but rather on openness and exploration. He asks how the world between 1915 and 1945 might look to Gregor Samsa, the ultimate outsider, and follows the track of the possibilities that present themselves. This nonmethod gives the book its feel of spontaneity and life, its energy, its freedom from the deadening conventions of ordinary fiction.

The New York Times reviewer of Ives' "Insect Sonata" writes, "It is an extraordinary hodgepodge, but something that lives and that vibrates with conviction is there. ... It is genuine, if it is not a masterpiece, and that is the important thing." The same can be said for Insect Dreams.
-- End --

Classical Music in Literature

Wed, 8 May 2002 21:31:36 -0400

Friday Column: Classical Music in Literature
Scott Esposito
Classical music, I have been told, is near death. Similarly, I've read in many places (probably written by the same people) of the novel's imminent demise. Strange then how some of the freshest work I've read recently has resulted from the union of these two dying art forms.

Proving that classical music can be as profound and bizarre as anything a novelist can toss into the mix, author Marc Estrin puts the fictitious Insect Sonata by noted maverick composer Charles Ives in his novel Insect Dreams. Here's part of its performance on April 1, 1931:
Without a word of introduction, [the pianist] walked upstage of the Steinway Concert Grand and returned with a large brick and two pieces of two-by-four, one 47 3/4 inches, the other 45 1/2 inches, the longer pained in white, the shorter in black enamel. He put the wood on the piano bench and carefully leaned the cement block on the sustaining pedal. Climbing out from under the keyboard, he retrieved the wood and placed the longer piece, narrow edge down, along the white keys, and the shorter one, wider side down, along the black. He was ready to begin the first movement: "Creation."
Standing over the keyboard, the piano bench behind him, he took a huge breath and crashed his whole body weight, elbows first, down onto the wood. Some in the audience gasped, most jumped. The piano let out a sound such as had never been heard in any concert hall. At no time, ever, had all eighty-eight notes of a Steinway Concert Grand been simultaneously sounded and sustained publicly.
Quadruple fortissimo to start, the opening ultra-chord took a full two and a half minutes to decay into nothingness.
Estrin goes on to gloss this singular opening: it's a musical homage to the (then) recently theorized Big Bang. In addition to being good reading, this performance neatly captures the spirit of the times--the public and artistic infatuation with science, particularly theoretical physics, which was then revealing previously unthinkable realms and inspiring novelists and film directors to unleash visions of ludicrous inventions, like time machines, atomic energy plants, and atomic bombs.
(Considerations of other novels in full article.)

Bugged By History

Sat, 27 Apr 2002 20:49:55 -0400

By NIKKI BARRETT
Toronto Globe and Mail
Saturday, April 27, 2002 – Print Edition, Page D21

Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa
By Marc Estrin
Blue Hen, 468 pages, $38.99

Who hasn't rolled out of bed some bleak morning feeling like a loathsome bug? That was part of the genius of Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka's novella that told of Gregor Samsa, fabric salesman turned vermin: Even the most evolved of us has experienced shades of entomological alienation.
Marc Estrin, in his ambitious first novel, Insect Dreams, is not content to let Kafka's insights, let alone the actual bug, die a lonely death in some Prague dumpster. With wit, humour and daunting intellect, Estrin resurrects one of literature's most recognized symbols of the plight of modern man, and sends the renowned cockroach scuttling through the discoveries and disasters of the first half of the 20th century.

In 43 chapters, each an astonishing montage, Estrin follows Gregor Samsa from his humble, buggy beginnings in a Viennese sideshow, "a mind-boggling collection of freaks and oddities," via New York -- on a trip he wins for inspiring "the Gregor," the latest dance craze sweeping the United States -- to the White House and finally to New Mexico, where he plays his fateful role as risk assessor on the Manhattan Project.
In Voltaire-meets-Forrest-Gump fashion, and in an intoxicating meld of fact and fiction, Estrin takes his cockroach on a quest to help the human race. How, Gregor wants to know, "can one live freely in a world dominated by suffering, chaos, and absurdity?" Along the way on his quest, he influences the lives of such historical greats as Franklin Roosevelt; composer Charlie Ives, whose music captured the sound of the 20th century, "the roar of our cities and factories, the clash of our people, races, cultures, a satanic bellowing-out that added up to sheer madness"; feminist Alice Paul; Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. Gregor lands in the United States of the Prohibition era, and proceeds to brush up against such defining historical moments as the Sacco-Vanzetti trials, New York's World Fair in 1929 and Myaguchi's self-immolation on the steps of the Capitol as protest to the Japanese internment in 1942.
Part primer on the science of the X-ray and the atom bomb, part recap of the wisdom of Spengler, Wittgenstein, Dostoyevsky, Rilke and Sophocles, part ecstatic celebration of the music of Ives and Stravinsky, part existentialist fugue, Insect Dreams reads like a tumultuous, intertextual tear through some of the greatest philosophers, scientists, musicians and artists of our past. It is a giant, bold novel, a weighty existentialist investigation rendered with delightful whimsy.
At times, Gregor's passivity, his quiet heroics in the face of his thwarted quest, can be maddening, and the numerous digressions, whether they detail the physiognomy of a roach or the mathematical formulae for the Samsa conjecture, are sometimes cumbersome. But this is a wildly imagined episodic novel. Best not to hurtle through it, but rather to allow the manifold wisdom of each chapter to resonate fully. In one of my favourite chapters, the placid cockroach is under the couch listening to Roosevelt read A Christmas Carol. Estrin juxtaposes Dickens's sentimental tale with excerpts of a letter Gregor has received from a dying friend, a witness to the burgeoning atrocities of Nazi Germany. Via this sort of sly and surprising juxtaposition, Estrin's brilliant insights into the abuses of science and political power bristle off the page.
Although Insect Dreams is a vibrant, ecstatic novel, it is freighted with great darkness and destruction: "Where was the world acceptable? Back to starving protofascist Europe? Africa, throttled by imperialism? South America, run by plutocracy for personal benefit? Antarctica? Too cold." Estrin's evocative and allusive prose trips lightly through some dark territory, and for all the novel's hilarity it is ultimately heart-wrenching, strangely bleak and beautiful.
If you're a sucker for existentialism, for the big why of life and the bewildering how and where we've gone wrong, if you like zany humour underpinned with poignant searching, try dreaming along with Estrin's Insect Dreams. Get to know his bug. You'll recognize your own cockroachness in him.
And given our current war context, Estrin's hysterical plotting of the life of this über-outcast -- his daunting harvest of inherited wisdom so flagrantly ignored, his implicit warnings about the often despicable drift of human progress -- could not be more relevant.
This morning Nikki Barrett awoke, still a human writer living in Toronto.

'Insect Dreams' Spells Doom

Sun, 14 Apr 2002 20:49:50 -0400

"INSECT DREAMS" SPELLS DOOM
Des Moines, IA, Register
4/14/2002

TOM SIMMONS

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, my school district did away with many standard English courses in favor, of theme courses: "Alienation in Modem Literature, "The Uncommon Man," "Writing by Women," and so on. Why is it that I think that curricular bravery served us better than the test-based courses of today's schools?

One answer among many might be that we were all required to read Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a novel about a man named Gregor Samsa who, after a night of troubled dreams, found himself turned into a giant insect. This book was the key to our education in symbolic thought. What would it mean to be as different as Gregor? But weren't we all that different?

Whether we answered yes or no, we were on our way to using symbolic argument to define ourselves.

But what of Gregor Samsa? His ignominious end - being swept into the dustbin at the end of the novel - remains to many readers both symbolic and unsatisfying. Surely so remarkable and wounded a creature as Gregor could have crafted a way out?

A hundred years or so after Gregor's apparent demise, novelist Marc Estrin writes to report that reports of Gregor's death were, in fact, greatly exaggerated. In a brilliant and meticulously researched - and eccentric - novel, Estrin lays out Samsa's course through the 20th century, right up to the first atomic explosion at Los Alamos, in which Samsa is, apparently, extinguished.

How could Kafka's Gregor get from Vienna to Los Alamos? And why? We'll deal with the how first.

Through the magic of fiction, Gregor is not actually swept into a dustbin, he's sold by his housekeeper, Anna Marie Schlessweg, to the keeper of a small circus of oddities in Vienna, Amadeus Hoffnung. Of all Hoffnung's oddities, however, Gregor is the oddest: a human-sized cockroach, oozing miserably from an incurable wound in his exoskeleton, yet articulate and able to read. By the end of World War I, all Vienna is taken up with Hoffnung's circus and its main act - a talking cockroach who can discourse at length on Oswald Spengler's latest sensation, -The Decline of the West."

Estrin sends Gregor on a journey through the first half of the 20th century in the West. On the way, Gregor meets Ludwig Wittgenstein and discusses philosophical principles with him. Later Gregor flies, in a scene bizarrely reminiscent of Richard Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," a partial polar route to the United States. He becomes good friends with the feminist activist Alice Paul, attempting a romantic liaison with her which is foiled only because, well, he's a cockroach and she's not. He also becomes a major confidant of Charles Ives. composer and insurance executive. Along the way, loyal to Ives, he begins a semi-secret career as a dossier gatherer on Herbert Hoover, to help seal Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency.

Gregor is also caught up in the protests against the 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In one of the most astonishing chapters of the book Estrin has Gregor dream himself and Alice Paul as the electrocuted pair, the dream itself operating within a meditation on the invention and early application of the electric chair.

This preoccupation with bureaucratically researched and supported death and destruction, brings us to the why of Gregor's odyssey. As Gregor's scientific acumen and political savvy win him increasing friends in the Roosevelt White House, he finds himself suddenly in the
company of the young Richard Feynman, a brilliant physicist and prankster who confounds government cryptologists in Los Alamos by sending love letters to his wife in codes they can't crack.

But Feynman is also part of the "Manhattan Project" in Los Alamos. At the end, shortly before the first, bomb is to be exploded Gregor asks to be driven to Ground Zero, where he will witness the event in all its immediate perfection. His odyssey is, complete and the why is answered: Gregor's fate is to track the darkest vector of western culture.

You can see how there might be an annoying trick at the core of this novel, an excess of ingenuity that dooms it. Gregor could be seen as a literary device by which Estrin moves
through the 20th century, analyzing the "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II described it.

What saves "Insect Dreams" from this allegation of essential contrivance is the ferocity of Estrin's historical research and the depth of the pattern that emerges about the West's fascination with death. In Estrin's novel Gregor comes up against forces more faceless and more cruel than even Kafka might have imagined.

Gregor is repeatedly stunned by the dream-like bureaucracies of American democracy, by the enormous sums of money spent on crime control, and executions, by the repeated failures of justice for those most at risk in this culture, and finally by the link between the most brilliant scientific minds in the nation and the atomic bomb, the ultimate symbol and reality of death.

Estrin's novel is unsparing in its conclusion that what America and its adversaries have bred is a world culture that will annihilate us unless we find a way seriously to begin to change it.

Tom Simmons Is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Marc Estrin turns tragic Kafka story into poignant fairytale

Fri, 1 Mar 2002 21:02:03 -0500

Marc Estrin turns tragic Kafka story into poignant fairytale
Times-Argus, March 1, 2002
By Jules Rabin
Correspondent

Vermont’s own Marc Estrin has written a whale of a book about a man-size cockroach named Gregor Samsa. This Samsa started out in life as the sad and doomed alter ego of Franz Kafka, as one suspects, and went on to become the merry and cultivated alter ego of Estrin himself.

As we remember, the original Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” had been a humble fabric salesman who lived a dreary and repressed life in his parents’ home in Prague in the early part of the 20th century – and woke up one morning to find that he now inhabited the body of a giant cockroach, while fully retaining his human mind and sensibilities.

There was nothing that Kafka’s original Gregor could do about his nightmare awakening. A man he had been, and a cockroach he now was.

That fact and the realization of it were absolute. His days in the parental home were henceforth numbered, and he pined away in the dust under a sofa in his room, an object of revulsion to his shamed parents.

Estrin’s long book, “Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa,” begins with a hopeful revision of Kafka’s account of the sad ending of Gregor Samsa’s life. In Estrin’s telling, the woebegone cockroach-man doesn’t end up in the trash bin a short time after his metamorphosis, as Kafka, burdened with Old World morbidity, intimates he did. Rather, he is rescued by the Samsa cleaning lady, who sells him to a freak show run by a kindly impresario. There Gregor recovers both his health and confidence, and embarks on a wondrous career – here is the great heart of Estrin’s picaresque fairy tale – of conversing and collaborating with some of the most brilliant men and women of the first part of the 20th century, from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, and Wilhelm Roentgen (whose astonishing X-Ray machine proves that there isn’t a man’s body concealed beneath the cockroach’s chitin), to Sacco and Vanzetti, Charles Ives, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and a great cast of the other founding Los Alamos atomic scientists.

And also Alice Paul, the American feminist, whom Gregor seduces in an improbable scene where, for probably the first time in literary history, a cockroach attempts the act of love with a woman.

The Alice Paul episode is hard to take; an anatomical astonishment and improbability, not to mention an unkindness to the memory of that woman. Estrin requires further radical suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part when we see that, once Gregor arrives in America, hardly anyone in the tale bats an eye at his, shall we say, “unusual” appearance; not in his first months in New York, when he takes an ordinary job as elevator operator, hardly disguised by the clothing he throws on (he has also learned to stand and walk erect), or later, having moved up in the world, when he goes to work every day as a risk-management analyst in a great insurance company, or later still, when he offers FDR, as he does other great figures he meets, a claw to shake, rather than a hand.

The joke submerged in Estrin’s fancy is that what Europe, with its historic constraints, has no use for – a cockroach-man – can establish a place for himself in dizzy, motley America. There is no shock at the sight and feel of him, or even raised eyebrows. “So what else is new?”

Estrin’s elan and his conviction catch the reader up, and we become comfortable ourselves with the cockroach Gregor as a marvelous device for entering our author’s head, which we discover to be furnished – teeming – with a wide range of scholarship. Einstein, Fermi, Ives, Roosevelt; atomic physics, musicology, medicine, philosophy, entomology (of course) ; and the politics of The New Deal – Estrin moves and discourses comfortably with all personages and through all fields. Remarkably, he doesn’t casually drop names and then skitter away. He’s in fact a great hand at the mini-treatise. It’s difficult to think of another novel that displays such a variety of scholarship in as responsible depth. (Nor can I think of another novel where such a germane and usable bibliography is provided – 60 items in Estrin’s case.) Estrin, at least to the non-specialist’s eye, has done his homework competently in every field he visits.

The second metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa, the one wrought by Estrin, from European to American, is, like the first metamorphosis revealed by Kafka (from man to cockroach), astonishing. "Samsa" (Gregor’s second name) in Czech means something like "I am alone." That is the situation of Kafka’s Gregor, and it was, one speculates, the situation of Kafka himself. Kafka’s Gregor is the inward-turned man of the first half of the 20th century, which was Sigmund Freud’s half-century, too. He was enveloped in his own woes, a man alone in his private ghetto.

Estrin’s Gregor is a man altogether of another epoch and disposition. He is socially energetic, intensely humane (this picaro of ideas and causes is not a rascal but a great-soul), and is conversant with the best thought and culture of his day. Out from under Kafka’s couch he comes, and into the daylight of America!

Two authors, Kafka and Estrin. And two Gregors, two continents, two Weltanschauungen, and two very different Jewish sensibilities. Kafka, Estrin, and both Gregors were all born Jewish, and while none of the four was in any ostensible way a practicing Jew, all bore The Mark.

Kafka’s Gregor was timorous and depressive and led a claustrophobic life. And – how prophetic was Kafka in 1913! – once revealed as a cockroach (Jew?), he ended his life sequestered in the filthy death camp of his own room, foreshadowing the fate of his fellow Jews thirty years later. The other, American Gregor, to whom Estrin gave a second, generous metamorphosis by the simple act of transportation from Europe to America, turned his being outward to the wide horizons of the world, and in Estrin’s fiction, no one barred his way. His charm and his intelligence together opened all doors, even the portal of Alice Paul’s virginity.

The first Gregor cowered in the prison of his room when his cockroach nature became manifest, and there he languished. Wasn’t a favorite Nazi epithet for Jews “vermin,” and didn’t vermin, once identified, have to be separated from civil society and exterminated?

Identically with the first Gregor, the second Gregor was visibly and strikingly coated with chitin and bore six roach-legs on his body and weird saucer eyes, to the end of his days. But in America, where anything goes and everyone is too busy scuttling through his own affairs, each of us his or her own ultimate cockroach ... who noticed or cared?

No one did, in Estrin’s generous continuation of Kafka's woeful tale, except perhaps the indecipherable Alice Paul.