INSECT DREAMS

Gregor Samsa returns, albeit still in cockroach form, in this survey course of early 20th-century Western history packaged as a sequel to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

Somehow having survived the events of that tale, Samsa resurfaces in 1915 at a Viennese freakshow. There, the erudite and angst-ridden cockroach lectures crowds on the historical implications of Oswald Spengler’s bestseller The Decline of the West and recites passages from Rilke to an often rapturous response. While there is some wonder and puzzlement at the appearance of this literate bug—X-ray discoverer Roentgen makes an appearance to scan his innards to convince the crowd that there is no little man inside pulling strings—the world is for the most part unfazed by Samsa. He meets luminaries like Musil and Wittgenstein, with whom he holds appropriately arch conversations on the state of the world. Then, looking for new opportunities, he sets off for New York. A rather disastrous and brief affair with a woman is one of his few nonintellectual pursuits; being a material witness at the Scopes trial is a more typical activity for this cockroach with an unusually agile brain. His impressive intellect lands him a job working for avant-garde composer and life insurance mogul Charles Ives, then a consultancy with FDR’s campaign, and ultimately a job—in a dark closet of the White House—as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in charge of Entomological Affairs. By the time Samsa has met Einstein and moved to Los Alamos to take part in the Manhattan Project, it’s clear that Estrin is concerned not at all with one-upping or reexamining Kafka in the manner of The Wind Done Gone. This is a grand comic opera starring a meditative cockroach scuttling through the corridors of power at the fulcrum of the 20th century.

An impressive debut, notable for a generous sense of fun that never detracts from the serious historical and existential implications of all that it so entertainingly depicts.