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You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, more 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.

This is the second week I'm spending with Norman Mailer to talk about his new novel,

The Castle in the Forest, published by Random House.

It's an extraordinary novel in which the, an Castle in the Forest, published by Random House. It's an extraordinary novel

in which an assistant to the devil named Dieter narrates the young life of Adolf Hitler.

It's quite an extraordinary achievement. Mailer is 84 years old, And I noticed that the book is dedicated to a fleet of

grandchildren, godchildren, a grandniece. And I know that you've said that your impulse was to tell

them about Hitler and a kind of evil that had not been known before,

that the question is what was so horrific about Hitler. We've known so many tyrants and terrorists since, and that you attempted to create a novel

that would answer the question of what the world saw when it saw Hitler.

What was that?

Well, to begin with, I want to tell you, I love my grandchildren, but I wasn't writing the book for them in that I wanted to give them a little passing tribute and perhaps get them slightly interested in literature against all the obstacles to reading that are going to face them in years to come.

No, I wanted to talk to the world.

A novelist always wants to do that.

I wanted to say the world, we've really got to start thinking, in my opinion,

much more seriously about Hitler because he's inexplicable.

And as humans, we fester, we fret, we become obsessed with matters that we cannot explain to ourselves.

As humans, our pride is that we are brilliant, that there are many things we can figure out

that we will progress into more and more understanding of every aspect of life.

And there's Hitler in the way.

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