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VN & Gregor Samsa
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Subject: Book Review 'NY Times' --
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/books/review/24TUCK
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 10:09:46 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
To: chtodel@gte.net
CC:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/books/review/24TUCKERT.html
[New York Times Books] [The New York Times] March 24, 2002
'Insect Dreams': After Gregor Samsa's Metamorphosis
By KEN TUCKER
veryone remembers the beginning of Franz Kafka's ''Metamorphosis''
(1915), in which Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself
transformed into a large insect. The critic Marvin Mudrick observed that
''The Metamorphosis'' is ''an animal story which isn't a parable because
the interest is in what's happening, not in why it happened or what it
all means.'' In his first novel, ''Insect Dreams: The Half Life of
Gregor Samsa,'' Marc Estrin plucks the bug, which was tossed into the
trash at the conclusion of Kafka's tale, and lets him live on in a book
that is a sort of ''Ragtime'' for roaches.
Estrin propels the wriggly, six-legged Samsa through the first half of
the 20th century, where he has vigorous verbal encounters with, among
many others, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, Charles Ives and Albert
Einstein. He even turns up as a surprise witness in the Scopes monkey
trial. Samsa becomes a pop-culture sensation -- 1920's flappers bend
their limbs to a new dance, ''the Gregor.'' He takes a job at Ives's
insurance company, where he devises the theory of risk management, and
eventually contributes to the World War II effort, for which he is given
an appropriately small, dank office in the basement of the White House
by Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Eleanor Roosevelt, presaging the concept of
political correctness, refers gently to Gregor as a ''roach person.'')
This literary bugatelle could easily have become excruciatingly cute; I
feared the worst early on, when Estrin has Musil -- the author of the
exquisitely interminable novel ''The Man Without Qualities,'' here
amusingly portrayed as a ponderous bore -- refer to Gregor as ''Herr
Larva.'' But as ''Insect Dreams'' proceeds, it takes on its own logic.
Having first contradicted Kafka in deciding that the charwoman employed
by Gregor's parents did not dispose of their monstrous son, Estrin, like
Gregor, is liberated to explore the implications of human intelligence
trapped in a cracked carapace (remember the apple the appalled Papa
Samsa throws so violently it permanently wounds his son?). Treated first
as a freak-show novelty, then as a scuttling savant, Gregor becomes a
complex figure in Estrin's imagination. He's a troubled soul, ''the sum
of his confusions''; a humble bourgeois whose physical transformation
also alters his inner self: he finds himself debating the morality of
the atomic bomb with J. Robert Oppenheimer, as well as experiencing a
longing for a woman so intense he contemplates amputating two legs to
approximate more closely a human's four limbs. This is the ''half life''
of Estrin's subtitle: as a creature incapable of fully inhabiting either
the insect world or humanity, he settles for working hard, as
industriously as a burrowing bug, to move history in what he thinks is
the proper direction.
Estrin, who refers to Gregor as a ''5-foot-6-inch cockroach,'' has
either opted not to read or (more likely) chosen to ignore Vladimir
Nabokov's Cornell lecture on ''The Metamorphosis,'' in which the
novelist-naturalist declared that, given Kafka's description, Samsa
could not be a cockroach but rather was a beetle, and only three feet
long at that. But Estrin's portrayal of Gregor does echo Nabokov's
judgment of Kafka's writing, that ''no poetical metaphors ornament his
stark black-and-white story; the limpidity of his style stresses the
dark richness of his fantasy.'' Estrin, who is also a cellist, has music
in his prose. After describing a Wittgenstein forced to teach grade
school for money and taking his bitterness out on his students, Estrin
notes of his ever-sensitive man-roach: ''If human character is
infinitely plastic, he worried, what is to stop these children from
being entirely formed by the resentments of their elders? He carried one
such wound in his own back, unhealing, a permanent crater in his soul.''
Like his version of Kafka's creation, Estrin, with his appropriated
Gregor, is busy ''building history from venomous scares,'' and
furthering that history with a wit deepened by a vivid depiction of a
pained creature suffused with generosity, curiosity and heroic
persistence.
Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly.
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