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 Book World.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Carol Phillips,

the author most recently of The Nature of Blood, published by Knopf.

The books preceding it in reverse order are crossing the river, Cambridge,

State of Independence, The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and a book of nonfiction called the European Tribe.

Now, I'm hoping that this very unusual book will emerge in the listener's mind as we talk

because it does a terrifying and fascinating thing.

It attempts to join certain very disparate moments of art and history.

One is the experience of a family in the concentration camps and the consequent impassivity,

disorientation and inability to trust, which follows in the wake of that experience.

Then we are shifted to Italy in the 15th century among the people who, while making it possible

for Jews only to function as money lenders, are at the same time hating them for their function as money lenders.

And then in the most audacious step, suddenly the book took me over when we are witnessing a narrative by Othello,

who is in Venice,

and he goes to have a letter to him from Desdemona

translated for him by a Hebrew scholar

in the original ghetto for the Jews in Venice.

And at this point, one begins to feel the complexity of

...