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 it's a pleasure for me to be with Jonathan Saffron 4, the author most recently of

extremely loud and incredibly close published by Houghton Mifflin.

His previous novel is Everything is Illuminated.

And let's start by talking about this narrator.

Tell me about him.

Where is he from in your imagination?

Tell you about him.

I feel like I told you about him.

Where is he from in my imagination? You know,

I wasn't drawing upon anybody. I wasn't drawing upon myself. I do have cousins who are about that age,

but he doesn't remind me of them, not of my little brother. He's not a realistic character in the sense that there's nothing in the world I could point to and say that's like Oscar.

And I guess it speaks to something larger, which is just how I'm generally not that

concerned about making realistic characters.

I like making characters who are real.

And it's funny, the ways that, I don't know if you've felt this at all, and the ways

that people talk about books, the way the books are written about, they're being

...