“Gregor Had Yet to Discover That Life Was Truly Stranger Than Fiction”: Proverbial Messages in Marc Estrin’s Kafkaesque Novel Insect Dreams. The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002)

Readers and reviewers alike have delighted in Insect Dreams. The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Marc Estrin’s survey of political and cultural developments in Europe and the United States between 1915 and 1945. Estrin traces the odyssey of Gregor Samsa, Franz Kafka’s most famous literary character, from Vienna to Los Alamos via New York and Washington, D.C. Up until now, however, no one has followed the red thread of proverbs and proverbial expressions throughout this epic work. By exploring when, why, how, by whom, and to whom proverbs are used in Insect Dreams, we show what effect the traditional or modified proverbial language has on the style and message of this truly innovative American novel. This modern novel is proof positive that proverbs can play a major role in a literary work whose author plays all registers of language, just as Nobel laureates Günter Grass, Elfriede Jellinek, José Saramago, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have done with proverbs in their novels