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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sloferblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today my guest

is Mark Estrin. He's the author of a novel called Insect Dreams, The Half-Life of Gregor

Somsa, published by Blue Hen Books. And, you know, listeners who've been listening for a long time know that I don't invite authors of first novels onto Bookworm very often.

Not because the books aren't good, but because I usually think it takes an author two or three books to demonstrate the breadth of their concerns, to have, in fact, something to talk about.

Now, when I started reading insect dreams, I wasn't sure that I was going to like it, in fact.

It seemed at first to me to be a book like Ragtime or The World

According to Garp, a book in which a fictional character would intersect with the real world

in ways that I basically knew about. But as I started to read, especially as I got a third of

the way into the book, I realize that this was not

a book of pastiche and parody of cakewalks and orchestrations of events, but rather

it wants to be a sort of Dostoevsky novel, a novel sort of like the idiot, in which Kafka's character, Gregas Samsa, is set to observe the events of the century that spawned him and to place us in a world where we in dire need of metamorphosis, of some kind of spiritual change, are stuck,

because Gregor, who changes into a cockroach in a way is stuck there in the Kafka story.

He's pinned in a way in his bedroom.

And what we're going to begin to look at are the possibilities that change leads our souls to be stuck in one place.

Am I correct in describing this book in some way?

A lot of the writing of this book was my coming to understand more deeply what was in initially a rather superficial conception.

It was originally an idea that I had conceived all at once in its entirety to liberate Gregor from under the couch and Prague and put him through all of the tricks that I put him through without really knowing what the meaning of those things

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