Marc Estrin
Bugged By History
Saturday, April 27, 2002
ByNIKKI BARRETT
Toronto Globe and Mail
Saturday, April 27, 2002–Print Edition, PageD21
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.