Marc Estrin

'Insect Dreams' gives Kafka a more satisfying resolution

Sunday, February 17, 2002

You might have loved, hated and pitied Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman-cum-cockroach, in Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."

Decades ago, high school or college students who had read Kafka's legendary tale suffered from physical, social and political alienation, from acne to the military draft.

Gregor, at least, had done something about his alienation. He literally changed into the giant insect after working long hours at a meaningless job, supporting a family who only cared about his money-making ability.

As a real bug, complete with thorax, antennae, exoskeleton and six tiny legs waving in the air above his bed, he didn't have to go to work. His family had to hustle for their dinners themselves.

There was one thing wrong with Gregor's solution to life in the urban, capitalist, and newly industrialized Prague of 1915. His alienation from self is so complete that it can lead only to death.

It was not a satisfying ending. In fact, it was downright depressing. But now there is hope. Marc Estrin has written an alternative ending for Gregor in the novel "Insect Dreams," a what-might-have-been journey with Gregor through much of the 20th century.

What if Gregor had been rescued from his garbage-filled room by the family cleaning lady? What if he turned up a few months later in a freak sideshow in Vienna reading Rainer Maria Rilke to onlookers? What if he were to meet philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein? What if Gregor were to work his way into Franklin Delano Roosevelt's confidence and go to Los Alamos to build the bomb?

Does it sound like Forrest Gump meets Franz Kafka? Not.

Estrin's fascinating world is neither mawkish or trite. Instead it is an intellectual journey that is at once personal and political.

We struggle with Gregor over his most undeniable otherness. He walks upright most of the time. He wears a suit of clothes. He longs to roam New York at night like his smaller brethren. Overcoming that longing he tries to improve the human world.

He works in an insurance office, like Kafka, and becomes an expert in risk management. He ends up in Roosevelt's campaign, living in a White House kitchen cupboard.

Gregor loses FDR's ear, however, over two issues Gregor seems to understand better than any biped.

He talks to the president about the beginnings of the Holocaust and is dismissed. "I've done enough for the Jewish vote," FDR tells him.

When Gregor later tells Roosevelt that he has met a Japanese-American who plans to commit suicide on the Capitol steps rather than be interned with thousands of others, FDR says, "Does he need any help from us?"

Gregor is shipped to Los Alamos as a graceful exit for FDR's now high-profile adviser. The insurance risks Gregor takes on in New Mexico in 1943, of course, are those of radiation exposure. Once again, Gregor finds himself alone.

The Manhattan Project's Gen. Leslie Groves fears that Gregor's precautions will slow the work on the atom bomb.

All cockroaches love tight places, and Gregor fits snugly into the 20th century's most horrific and revolutionary events. So does Kafka's original idea that if we allow ourselves to be beaten down by events, the system, technology, or other human beings, we will become like the original Gregor lost, alone, silent.

Most of the time Estrin negotiates this treacherous territory of philosophical metaphor without bogging the reader down with mind games. "Insect Dreams" is never a literary insider joke. You can enjoy it without ever reading Kafka. That's because Gregor is human. We empathize with him, fear for him. He speaks the truth and takes the consequences.

How appropriate for a German Jew now a cockroach to sound the alarms that we should have heard that we were turning on 6 million of our fellow humans simply because they were different, that neither we nor nature would ever be the same if we used nuclear weaponry for mass destruction. 

Estrin communicates a sadness but also gives us a hero of such nobility that we can't help but hope that our current period of unspeakable human violence will turn out differently.

Mary Beth Libbey teaches English at Sandia Prep and wrote this review for the Albuquerque Journal.