ANXIOUS PLEASURES

Novelist Lance Olsen casts an eye on Kafka's insect.

An enduring literary rumor has it that Gregor Samsa—the young cloth-salesman who wakes up to find himself possessed of vaguely "numerous" legs and a hard-plated back—is, specifically, a cockroach. Nabokov, fond of entomology, refuted the cockroach rumor to suggest Samsa was a beetle. John Updike has insinuated a centipede.

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