Insect Dreams: The Half Life Of Gregor Samsa [Paperback]

Marc Estrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2005

It seems the Samsas' chambermaid only claimed to sweep into the dustbin the twentieth century's most remarkable contemplative. Instead, having spirited him from his bedchamber, she apparently sold the metamorphosed Gregor to a Viennese sideshow, where-it being 1915-he could earn his living lecturing carnival crowds on the implications of Rilke and Herr Spengler.

In this delightfully original work of imagination, compassion, and good reason, we follow the trajectory of Kafka's salesman-turned-cockroach across two continents and thirty years as he touches the most significant flash points of his time. In the process, Marc Estrin delivers a human saga of cultural ambition and compassionate insight that may be the most surprising addition to Jewish literature in a generation.

What's more, the book is funny. And Estrin's Gregor is downright endearing.

With its reach and substance, Insect Dreams is nothing short of a liberal education-in cultural history, musical theory, nuclear physics, and the world of ideas. But it's also a remarkable reading experience. With a scope, heart, and intelligence unparalleled in recent memory, Insect Dreams should spark wide-ranging discussions about who we're becoming, now that the swiftest century is complete.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The hapless antihero who morphed into a cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis is resurrected and given a rather busy second life in Estrin's brilliantly conceived but erratic debut novel. In Estrin's version, Gregor Samsa is sold to a Viennese sideshow rather than being swept into the trash, and he quickly becomes the major attraction in entrepreneur Amadeus Hoffnung's bizarre little circus. The author keeps his early incarnation of Samsa reasonably close to Kafka's character, and he even adds a cheeky chapter in which Samsa meets Ludwig Wittgenstein. But when the circus subplot runs its course and Samsa goes off to New York, he undergoes a radical transformation into a half-man, half-insect superhero whom the author uses to reexamine the first half of the 20th century, with Samsa working behind the scenes as a liaison in the worlds of science, music, business and politics to push pivotal historical events in the right direction. His encounters with Charles Ives, FDR, Einstein and Oppenheimer, among others, are rendered with a combination of humor, chutzpah and intelligence. Even though Estrin has a tendency to go over the top, he succeeds at many levels in his recreation of one of Kafka's most memorable characters, redrawing Samsa as a compassionate, brilliant bug. The book's many excesses don't detract from the scope of its premise and the kaleidoscopic dazzle of its most successful episodes. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Jan.)Forecast: The whimsical jacket art and the tie to Kafka should catch the eye of a brainy subgroup of readers; the lively prose will keep them hooked.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Get ready for a highly imaginative ride through the cultural frontier of the early 20th century from the perspective of a character-turned-cockroach named Gregor Samsa from Kafka's The Metamorphosis. In a fantastic mixture of fact and fiction, this witty debut novel follows the adventures of Gregor from post-World War I Vienna through the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, NM. In numerous behind-the-scenes actions, Gregor befriends historical figures like Charles Ives, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Robert Oppenheimer, as well as numerous other highly fascinating fictional characters. Gregor has an impact on the unfolding of world events as we remember them and others that never got recorded in history books, such as Roosevelt's refusal to interfere with the genocide of the Jews. Gregor understands more than his human counterparts the essential qualities it takes to be human because he "asks too many questions, dreams too many dreams, and embarks on too many quests." A helpful bibliography is provided at the end. A colossal book of characters and events that inspires tears of laughter and sadness in its rich blend of clever metaphor and unsettling facts, this promises to become a pivotal literary landmark. Highly recommended. David A. Beron , Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 468 pages
• Publisher: Unbridled Books (November 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932961097
• ISBN-13: 978-1932961096
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,802,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont.

OR
Marc Estrin's world line approximates a cross between a fungal mycelium and a Rube Goldberg device. Biologist, theater director, EMT, Unitarian minister, physician assistant, puppeteer, political activist, college professor, cellist and conductor, he is baffling, even unto himself.

OR, Alternative:
Marc Estrin was hired to teach theater at Goddard College, but in this departmentless utopia, wound up also teaching music, writing, Finnegans Wake, math, physics, medical self-help and "crazy courses" like Philosophy for Dishwashers, an audio-based lecture/discussion series to sweeten the life of cafeteria volunteers. Such are the fruits of liberal education.

OR, Even more alternative:

Marc Estrin grew up in a small apartment so full of books you had to walk sideways in the hall. Of these, he read not one -- till age sixteen, when he gave up his literary virginity to Franz Kafka: The Trial was his introduction to the larger life. This explains much. A mediocre student in high school, he was teased by his father into reading The Magic Mountain during the summer before college. Epiphany! The book was for him a topo-map of western thought and culture. With Mann as his guide, he sailed through college and grad schools, making a Hegelian leap out of graduate science into the richer, if iffier area of the arts. The Vietnam war and Bertolt Brecht were his siren callers into political activity, and his professional theater work dissipated into organizing, college teaching and communal living. When these ceased to put food on the table, he reached back into a past life to study and practice medicine. With the computer came the possibility of writing without retyping -- a stimulus sufficient to have resulted in his current crop of manuscripts, published and unpublished.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Estrin did it. He made me love a roach., March 1, 2002

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (Hardcover)

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

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Book!!!!!, April 1, 2002

By 

James H. Schwartz (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (Hardcover)

INSECT DREAMS is an allegory following in the footsteps of THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and CANDIDE. Gregor, metamorphosed into a man-sized roach, canters picaresquely through some of the key historical events of the first half of the Twentieth Century as if they were real. The bug's conversations with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Ives, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, FDR, Richard Feynman and J. Robert Oppenheimer-to name only a few-are unbelievably comic as well as profoundly sad. The concept of a roach contributing the vital ingredients to several of the social programs and inventions that make up our "World of Tomorrow" is darkly funny, something like a Jewish joke told in the Warsaw Ghetto. His being bug-brown, Jewish, smart, bearing a chronic open wound inflicted by his father as well as belonging to the insect Order Orthoptera, Family Blattidae (cockroaches), creatures almost universally detested, would indeed seem to be a loaded symbolic trope if Estrin hadn't made his hero so loveable.

Estrin's prose is both forceful and graceful. His intelligence is enormous, encompassing biology and medicine, music, literature and of course manners, politics and history. Estrin's sensitivity is deeply moving: he has succeeded wonderfully in extending the life of Franz Kafka's most familiar creature.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tour de force, as moving as it is ambitious, February 19, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (Hardcover)

There's been a lot of "industry buzz" about this one, so I was both looking forward to reading it and dreading it--such is the nature of "industry buzz." But INSECT DREAMS is the real thing, a literary and imaginative tour de force that somehow manages to be both highbrow in the tremendous breadth and depth of its knowledge of history, music, science and philosophy, and unpretentious (unlike, say, "The Corrections," which I found brilliant, yes, but thought suffered from a far greater affection towards itself than towards its characters). INSECT DREAMS is also a terrific, page-turning read.

Perhaps Marc Estrin succeeds so admirably in this difficult balance because (it seems clear)he is writing from a place of moral and visceral urgency. And yet his is an urgency tempered by patience; a rare combination that--judging from the author photo--says something for writing one's first novel in middle age. But forget about age, Estrin is simply a writer writing for the best possible reason: because he has something to say. Whether or not one agrees with his "message" it is exhilirating to find oneself lost in the exquisite humor, pathos and intellectual acumen that define this memorable novel.