Gregor Keuschnig, the protagonist of [A Moment of True Feeling], awakens one morning from uneasy dreams to discover that he has not been transformed into a gigantic insect. His "large and intricate" Paris apartment shows no signs of convulsion, the leaves of the trees outside his window flutter tranquilly, his wife and daughter are peacefully asleep; still, the dream—in which he murdered an old woman—has cataclysmically cracked open his life. "[He] felt as though he were bursting out of his skin and a lump of flesh lay wet and heavy on the carpet." As Keuschnig goes through the day—drudging away at his Austrian Embassy job, coupling with his mistress, feverishly wandering the streets—he lives on the edge of transformation and then, at a small dinner party, the molecules begin to dance. "[Keuschnig] felt himself to be something BLOODCURDLINGLY strange … a monstrous, unfinished bag of...