Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2002, 480 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2003, 480 pages
"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."
It seems the Samsas’ chambermaid only claimed to sweep into the dustbin the twentieth century’s most remarkable contemplative. Instead, having spirited him from his bedchamber, she apparently sold the metamorphosed Gregor to a Viennese sideshow, where---it being 1915---he could earn his living lecturing carnival crowds on the implications of Rilke and Herr Spengler.
In this delightfully original work of imagination, compassion, and good reason, we follow the trajectory of Kafka’s salesman-turned-cockroach across two continents and thirty years as he touches the most significant flash points of his time. In the process, Marc Estrin delivers a human saga of cultural ambition and compassionate insight that may be the most surprising addition to Jewish literature in a generation.
What’s more, the book is funny. And Estrin’s Gregor is downright endearing.
With its reach and substance, Insect Dreams is nothing short of a liberal education---in cultural history, musical theory, nuclear physics, and the world of ideas. But it’s also a remarkable reading experience. With a scope, heart, and intelligence unparalleled in recent memory, Insect Dreams should spark wide-ranging discussions about who we’re becoming, now that the swiftest century is complete.
1. TAILS of HOFFNUNG
Wunderkammer Hoffnung---Amadeus Hoffnung’s Cabinet of Wonders---had begun as the hobby of a diminutive, shy adolescent: his childhood rock and insect collections, his autographs of singers from the Vienna State Opera, the paintings made by his oddly talented cat, and what was clearly the largest ball of string ever imagined by his otherwise mocking cohorts. The idea that his collection could become a business was far from the thoughts of this lonely child until one day in 1907 when his parents bought a Victrola, the very model pictured on "His Master’s Voice."
"You can start saving for your own record collection," his father said.
Karl Maria Hoffnung was not miserly, he simply wanted his son to learn the virtues of discernment and self-sufficiency. "I’ll add a crown a week to your allowance, and you can put it away for music. Maybe you could charge people to see your collections," he added, prescient.
Thus began young Amadeus’s ...
Frederick Reuss, author of Horace Afoot and Henry of Atlantic City
First It's funny. Second It's very funny. Third It's brilliant. Peter S. Beagle
The joy of this astonishing book - apart from its wit and its true erudition – is the tenderness with which the author treats even the least, and least worthy, of his characters. Insect Dreams is the kind of book you finish and immediately begin rereading, to see if it was really THAT good. It is. Roger Shattuck, National Book Award Winner
Against all odds, this slyly outrageous story keeps picking up momentum. It allows us to watch the most explosive events of the early twentieth century from the wings. The whole account is written in the key of---Candide, meet Dr. Strangelove. Tom Robbins
With its crazy-legged imagination, darting insights and twitchy wit, his is a creation that defies any sourpuss Raid to kill it dead.
If you liked Insect Dreams, try these:
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by Tyler Knox
Published 2008
It is the mid-1950s; in a fleabag hotel off Times Square Kockroach, perfectly content with life as an insect, awakens to discover that somehow he's become, of all things, a human. As Kockroach, led by his primitive desires and insectile amorality, navigates through the bizarre human realms of crime, business, politics, and sex, he meets with both ...
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Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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