Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

I grabbed this book because the title grabbed me. I have long been intrigued by Kafka's Metamorphosis. This lengthy continuation of Gregor Samsa's cockroach life was too good an idea to pass up.

Whereas Metamorphosis is a short story, Insect Dreams is one long novel, spanning almost half a century. And in that time, Samsa manages to meet a number of public figures and have quite a bit of influence on each of them. In this his life bears some small similarity to that of Forrest Gump. But don't be fooled. This is no Intellectual's Gump. I give thanks for that.

We are first introduced to Gregor when he is brought to a freak show in Germany, headed by a man with a disease that causes him to age much faster than a normal person. We quickly show more learn how educated and intelligent this giant cockroach is. He draws huge crowds, often for his opinions more than for his unusual physical being. Throughout the book, in fact, people who meet Gregor soon see the individual within, an admirable situation, and one that would not be likely in real life.

Gregor's personality is warm and caring, yet tuned to injustice. He is generous to a fault. The Kafka version was very different, from what I remember. Interestingly, Gregor even takes time to criticize kafka's characters at one point, saying they are too much the victims, not strong enough to resist the forces that attack them.

The novel is dotted with the word "metamorphosis". There are changes taking place all the time, within Gregor and many others.

I liked Gregor well enough, and I certainly learned a lot about cockroaches along the way. I also learned much about each of the famous characters, from Charles Ives to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and about the world they lived in. Quite a history book! Quite a trip altogether. show less

This tome took me several weeks to read, particularly once I hit the segment in which Samsa was working on the Manhattan project. Some of the information in the text was very science-y at points, which was a bit of a turn-off for me.

However, I really liked the book overall. I liked believing that there was more to Gregor Samsa than just what Kafka wrote. I also enjoyed some of the meta discussion of Kafka's works within the text itself. The ending (or what I saw as the "true ending," at least for me) was lovely.

As I said, this is quite a long book, but there are some really beautiful turns of phrase in it, and some of the insights are breathtaking. I am glad I picked this up at a little library I happened upon a few weeks ago.