Insect Dreams

Book excerpt: The metamorphosis of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa from fabric salesman to cockroach was surely one of the momentous transformations of the modern world. Now, in Marc Estrin’s astounding debut, Gregor undergoes yet another metamorphosis—one that propels him across the rocky and often ridiculous landscape of the early twentieth century. In these continuously surprising pages, Estrin’s Gregor—secretly sold to a Viennese sideshow by the Samsas’ chambermaid—comes to sharpen his mind against those of Wittgenstein, Spengler and Einstein; dance to the crazy rhythm of American Prohibition; appear as a surprise witness at the Scopes trial; become intimately involved in Alice Paul’s feminist movement (and with Alice Paul); encounter the KKK; and confer with FDR, and Robert Oppenheimer—and emerge from it all as the very essence of modern conscience.