The visitor sipped his tea, and after a while found himself describing another fire he had witnessed as a child in Prague, a synagogue burning in Josefov, the Jewish ghetto, the grand playfulness of arson.My favorite book read this year is the eight year-old debut novel of a Brooklyn transplant to Vermont. I've been meaning to read Estrin since the enticing Seven Days review of The Annotated Nose appeared 2 years ago, and perhaps may have even checked the Nose out of the library and didn't make much headway for a variety of reasons; now that I've made it through Insect Dreams, I can start working through his other stuff.
Estrin takes Kafka's protagonist, gives him a religion (Judaism), years of study and introspection to give him sufficient intellectual depth, and finally takes him on a tour of the first half of the 20th century, using his metamorphized state as a metaphor for the alien, both to give him a sense of kinship with the social outsiders and distance to "typical" Americans. Gregor's experiences are almost too broad for the novel to have much focus, heading toward Forrest Gump territory with the number of historical figures he rubs elbows with, but avoiding it (somewhat ironically) because of Gregor's simple humanity.
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