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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is Anand Grunberg, who's very unusual and exciting and hilarious and

disturbing new novel called The Jewish Messiah

has been published by the Penguin Press.

This is, in fact, the fifth book that's been published in English in America

by Arnon Grunberg, who was born in Amsterdam.

Yes, in Amsterdam.

And the books were Blue Mondays, Silent Extras, Phantom Pain, and the story of my baldness.

The originality of this book is that it seems to be about an opposition between pain and comfort or suffering

and comfort.

And to say that art does not comfort, what art does, the book says again and again, is to give a shape to pain.

And I...

Yes.

Now, there was a previous time. Famously, Matthew Arnold said that art offers consolation

in the face of the loss of faith.

This idea that art gives pain a shape is a fairly recent, if not a new one. Do you believe it?

Maybe. I think it's something that I could do, but it's not his, it's most important task, I would say.

...