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.

Hi, good afternoon, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

When I spoke to Harold Brantke here in the studio, it was a couple of weeks before the publication of his novel, The Runaway Soul, from Faris Strauss and Giroux.

Since then, the book has appeared, and like any work of genius, it's been greeted by reviews that have been both hateful and adjulatory, some of them even outraged with anger that such a book exists.

Myself, I regarded it, as the most profound and original novel published this year.

Harold Brodkees, the author of First Love and Other Sorrows and the recent stories in an

almost classical mode. The Runaway Soul, his new novel, features Wiley Selenowitz, the hero of many

of the stories in his earlier collection. I began by asking Harold Brodkechie about his comment

that his short story, Innocence, would not be the same if he were to write it today.

And I think, of course not.

This book is about consciousness, and it seems to be about a consciousness that can't, at any point, be a part of the same river.

In fact, you know, it seems a Heraklitean book,

that the first, you know, major meditation in the book is of someone sitting with his hand

in the water and recognizing that every current is a different current, that nothing is ever the same from moment to

moment, seems to be the matinee of the book, yes?

Yeah, it's even more extreme.

Without saying it flatly, it proposes as the most essential universal, the universal presence of time.

And it also proposes without being sure about it that everything that consists, everything that exists, is made of time, a version of time, a version of an element of time.

It's not just a case of proposing an Einsteinian constant, like the speed of light,

and saying that the one inescapable element in all of creation is time and then the particular mystery of time,

which is sometimes called its restlessness or its merciless transients, is, of course,

...