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, I'm talking for the first time to a writer, Naim Murr, who has written a novel,

The Perfect Man, which has been published by Random House. It is his third

book. The first was called The Boy, and the second was called The Genius of the Sea.

And I'll begin by saying it's one of the strangest books I've read in years with the additional piece of information

that I particularly like strange books and that like most strange books,

its strangeness may be my hallucination because the book is very compelling, very interesting.

The moment you step away from it, though, you say, that's very strange.

Now, in his first novel, The Boy, Naeem Murr invented a character who reinvents himself. He's a changeling of sorts, and we encounter him

in different contexts. In some, he seems significantly innocent. In others, depending on who's looking at him, he seems completely

depraved. And it's this indecision on the reader's part between what is innocence and what

is intentional depravity, is this character a victim or a victimizer

that makes the book so morally fascinating. So too in the perfect man. And I wanted to begin by

asking you, is there a certain vantage point from which the morality is in these books can be in some way aligned or explained?

Well, I think that's always a difficult thing.

As a writer, I never set out to write anything that I don't think about morality at all when I'm writing.

But I do think that there are just certain lines about the idea of perfection, of trying to be perfect.

...