You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

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

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm here today with the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz.

His most recent book is Panther in the basement, published by Harcad Brace and Company.

Among his more recent books are Don't Call It Night, FEMA, to Know a Woman, Black Box,

and to go back to the beginning, of course,

my Michael, elsewhere, perhaps, touch the water, touch the wind. Now, FEMA is a young person's story, and in fact, you say in it that everything has two sides except a shadow. And it seems to me that because this

book is the story of a very young person who has not yet learned the two sides of everything,

it's a more simple account than you usually find in an Amos-Az novel. Well, it's a more simple account than you usually find in an Amos novel.

Well, it aims at a certain simplicity.

Perhaps I should define it as a second simplicity, not below but beyond complexity.

It's about a little boy who, a young boy, who assumes that everything has two sides except for a shadow,

but eventually in the course of this short novel, he discovered that shadows too cast shadows.

He says, in fact, that some of his knowledge when he was a boy, because now he's grown up and writing this book,

came to him in the form of a shadow,

that he would know things before he knew he knew them.

And it seems in a sense that this book is written within that shadow,

the place before you know what is actually happening.

And there's a good deal of reconstruction that a reader does after the book to find out what

...