Marc Estrin Livres

As World War I began, Gregor Samsa, a good man turned-roach, burst into the world, and literature has never been the same. Kafka's 1915 Metamorphosis was a long short story, with an unhappy beginning, middle, and end. In Kafka's Roach, Estrin (along with the Samsa's housemaid) has rescued Gregor from his dusty death under a couch in Prague, schooled him at a Viennese sideshow, and impelled him over the Atlantic to take a crucial role in American history in the twenties, thirties and forties. Gregor (six feet tall, and an ever-improving speaker of English) becomes part of FDR's brain trust, living in the White House kitchen until he is sent out to Los Alamos as the risk manager for the Manhattan Project. His life ends under the bomb tower at the Trinity test, melted into the New Mexico sands. This huge, comic novel is rich in historical detail, ridiculous situations, and the thoughtful musings of its narrator.

Indian Springs, Nevada (pop 991), at the edge of the Mojave, is “downtown" to three — Creech Air Force Base, home to drone operators in their air-conditioned trailers,— High Desert State Prison, Nevada’s largest, newest, and most modern, and— the Sekhmet Temple of Goddess Spirituality, a women’s community in the desert.All three are concerned with violence against women.This remarkable combination is the setting for some very confused relations among four protagonists, in a plot modeled on Cervantes and Goethe. They are all musicians, and music maps their gnarly way throughout.

Hyde lives! (It's only the well-meaning Jekyll who is dead.) Cloak and cudgel discarded, he is now a suitably smooth operator. But as Mike Tyson observes in the epigraph, "Everybody's got a plan until he gets punched in the mouth."

The metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa was surely one of the momentous transformations of modern times. Kafka's burning vision of the future ended with Gregor being swept into a dustbin. But what if Gregor were to survive and live to challenge the wrongs clouding humanity's horizon? In Insect Dreams, Gregor--rescued by profiteers-- will sharpen his mind against the minds of Wittgenstein and Rilke, dance to the crazy rhythms of Prohibition, and appear as a surprise witness atthe Scopes trial. Eventually, he'll meet FDR, join the brain trust, and move into the White House. But a talking cockroach with an ethical agenda can wear out his welcome, and soon Gregor is reassigned as a risk management consultant for the Manhattan Project. What follows is nothing less than the explosive birth of contemporary existence--and the culmination of a tale that is as intellectually ambitious as it is warmhearted and funny.