Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverbladden this week.

I'm pleased to have as my guest, Ariel Dorfman.

He's the author most recently of Blake's Therapy, published by Seven Stories Press,

who will be reissuing his backlist in both English and Spanish.

This backlist includes prominent novels, plays, and essays, short stories as well,

including The Play Death and the Maiden, the novel The Nanny and the Iceberg.

A wonderful memoir, which I believe they've already brought out,

heading south, looking north, and it's a pleasure to have him here.

Blake's therapy involves a situation of spying and mistrust,

rather akin to that in Death and the Maiden.

And I thought it would be interesting because the structure of the novel

is so double in several senses at once.

I thought I would begin by mentioning an idea that I read in one of Dorfman's essays

about the writer Miguel Asturias, that writing involves a movement from folklore to, from actuality to folklore, from folklore to myth,

from myth to reification, to gossip, and then dissipation. And it seemed to me that since the

events in Blake's therapy occur twice, once an enactment

and once a more direct representation, I wondered if you could talk about the degrees of reality here.

Well, I've always been interested in what you would call the degrees of reality.

I've always been interested in the fact that we live through

...