No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant, varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span of more than six decade...
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Nov 10, 2007
Cindi
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While the concept of this book was interesting - the narrator was a demon who influenced the devopment of Adolph Hitler in his early years - I found it filled with so much disgusting detail that it was difficult to stay with it until the end. And since much of it did not directly involve Hitler, it seemed unnecessary. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
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Oct 04, 2007
Hitler may have been a tiny bit inbred, according to Mailer's research.
Also, the Devil pulled the strings like...like Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda.
But, couldn't get beyond page 100.
And, keep in mind, it's part one of a trilogy.
Forest of Trees is due in 2009, with Blondi and Eva to follow in 2010.
Also, the Devil pulled the strings like...like Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda.
But, couldn't get beyond page 100.
And, keep in mind, it's part one of a trilogy.
Forest of Trees is due in 2009, with Blondi and Eva to follow in 2010.
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Dec 16, 2009
Wendy
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A terrific concept -- Hitler's childhood, told from the vantage point of the Devil. Long, long, long, with a lot of odd side trips (what is Tsar Nicholas' coronation doing here???), and kind of overwrought. Wanted it to be a lot better than it was.
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Mar 02, 2009
Tracy
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This is my first book by Norman Mailer and it surly won't be my last. I did enjoy Mailer's writing style more than I liked the story line. The story is told from the perspective of one of Satan's devils and I found myself enjoying the details of what it is like to work for Satan, and what the crudgels (angels) are like, then about what in Hitler's past made him so evil. There is quiet a bit of time spend on the toilet training of little Adolf; better get it right parents, bee keeping, and a whol
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Apr 13, 2009
Kandice
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While I can see why some think Mailer is a genius, this was not, in my opinion, his best work. Mailer tends to become obsessed with things meant to dusgust us, and in this one,true to form, I was digusted over and over. I would find myself having to stop and backtrack a bit, thinking I must have missed something. He can't possibly be speaking of anuses right now. Unfortunately, he was.
The story itself was interesting only because we know this boy grows up to be a monster, but honestl More...
The story itself was interesting only because we know this boy grows up to be a monster, but honestl More...
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Feb 08, 2008
Apoorva
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i just read this book for our book club. I think others disliked it, but I thought it was fantastic and very unusual--which contributes to its fantastic-ness (is that a word)? The narrator is a minor devil who works for Satan, or maybe not, he doesn't really know, it could be another mid-level devil with no real power... and that begins to give you an idea of this elaborate world Mailer constructs.
The book is really more about Hitler's family than about him, and some in the book cl More...
The book is really more about Hitler's family than about him, and some in the book cl More...
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Sep 12, 2007
Fred
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Strange book. Combine "The Screwtape Letters", "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and "The Secret Life of Bees" and you can get a flavor for this book, although my comparison does a disservice to all 3 books mentioned above.
The tale chronicles the formation of the young Adolph Hitler and events leading up to his birth that contributed to his nature. Truthfully this book would bore a neo-Nazi to tears. Great if you are into beekeeping, incest or Austri More...
The tale chronicles the formation of the young Adolph Hitler and events leading up to his birth that contributed to his nature. Truthfully this book would bore a neo-Nazi to tears. Great if you are into beekeeping, incest or Austri More...
Jan 02, 2012
Gale
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About ten years ago, I immersed myself in personal reading about Hilter and the Holocaust, including a biography by Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, trying to understand how Hitler could have done what he did, how he became evil incarnate. I was no student of psychology, but I suspected family of origin issues deeply contributed to his psychopathy. I read other articles, citing beatings from his aging father and Hitler's contempt for his subservient young mother as reasons why he devolv
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Jun 24, 2011
Ian
rated it:
This book was published in the year of Mailers death. It now makes sense that this book was meant to be the first part of a tilogy.
We are dealing with the early life of Adolf Hitler. This makes the book pseudo fiction - as it plays on myths, legends and half truths. Was Hitler part Jewish? Was he the product of an Incesteous Union? Did he have only one ball?
Its that sort of book - deadly serious and blackly humorous. Also plays a nod to the art of fiction in a playf More...
We are dealing with the early life of Adolf Hitler. This makes the book pseudo fiction - as it plays on myths, legends and half truths. Was Hitler part Jewish? Was he the product of an Incesteous Union? Did he have only one ball?
Its that sort of book - deadly serious and blackly humorous. Also plays a nod to the art of fiction in a playf More...
Dec 26, 2010
Tony
rated it:
A fascinating book. My first of Mailer, and he is certainly a brilliant writer. That said, I was constantly mildly disappointed by the story. His characters and scenes are fully fleshed out in all sorts of details, some many people would prefer not to know. But that sort of thing doesn't bother me. it is that there is a lack of authenticity to the story. it is almost too carefully mapped out, and the characters are too well tailored. it seems somewhat artificial. Also the narrator revealing his
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May 28, 2010
John
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Before beginning my workday, which is in the afternoon because I sleep late, I find myself preparing for my writing by putting myself into a kind of trance. It helps that the kids are grown, the phone can be turned off, the computer hasn't yet taken over my life, and I can still find a voice. Just now Elvis told me, "I was an oak, now I'm a willow, and I can bend ..." I glanced above the CD player and saw the lyrics to "A Lover's Concerto," by the Toys, consisting of June Mon
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Apr 16, 2010
Ted
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Norman Mailer’s new novel, The Castle in the Forest, to be released on his 84th birthday on January 23rd, is an eccentric imagining about the young Adolph Hitler, narrated by a top lieutenant of The Devil. Mailer's novel is study in three generations of dysfunction, with the young Adolph being the cold sociopathic fulfilment of Hitler Family Values. In incident after incident, ranging from his father Alois's incestuous infidelities to the youth's rapt fascination in a village blacksmith's theori
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Apr 05, 2010
Chris
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I am not sure how to classify this novel - a fictional biography of Adolph Hitler's childhood, the beginning of his evil, as narrated and manipulated by the devil. The premise is that as a child of incest, he was ordained to evil and it was the devil's task to cultivate this tendency of his character. This book is about the extreme disfunction and abominable behavior of his family. There were interesting discussions of human psychology.
I picked this audio book off the shelf on the w More...
I picked this audio book off the shelf on the w More...
Jan 14, 2010
S
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Sep 15, 2009
John
rated it:
Norman Mailer continues to frustrate me. Sometimes he's brilliant and sometimes he's a cad. The latter is the case with regard to this novel. Filled with way too much crass, sexual perversion even for a liberal mind, this story appears to be Mailer's attempt to demonstrate to the reader how Adolf Hitler's family and childhood environment played a role in shaping him into the perverse and twisted individual that he ended up being as an adult. From start to finish sex, in all it's manifestations,
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May 21, 2009
T
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Dead now for not even two years and entering the reputational eclipse nearly all The Known do -- perhaps a symbolic washing of the corpse -- Norman Mailer deserves his last book to be noticed, even read.
Not that this is vintage Mailer, but it does contain vintage Mailer themes: sexual untidiness, grumbling guilt and bad faith, accident as opportunistic History, harmartia, and an existential theology, a battle between good and bad angels -- in this case, a secret bureaucracy not Ameri More...
Not that this is vintage Mailer, but it does contain vintage Mailer themes: sexual untidiness, grumbling guilt and bad faith, accident as opportunistic History, harmartia, and an existential theology, a battle between good and bad angels -- in this case, a secret bureaucracy not Ameri More...
Apr 05, 2009
Linda
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A fictionalized account of Hitler's childhood told from the perspective of a demon in the Devil's service, Norman Mailer's last novel The Castle in the Forest was far from your average chronicle of Hitler's life. By literally demonizing his narrator, Mailer succeeds in shifting the evil usually associated with Hitler, humanizing the person we usually associate with the Devil himself. While Mailer does build on extensive nonfiction sources, he fills in the gaps with a fictional glee. In short, Hi
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Nov 07, 2011
Robert
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A fine book for these dark days. Mailer wrote it as one watches an accident take place. The historic setting is merely a convenience; the man was writing about our time. In the same way, it is not simply a book about the family origins and early youth of Adolph Hitler. Mailer was too sophisticated a thinker and gifted a writer to use Hitler as more than a trope, rather than a metaphor for the the binary opposition of good and evil. Hitler is too convenient a villain to take literally.
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Jul 29, 2011
Andrew
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This book started off really interesting. I really enjoyed learning about Hitler's family, most of which was fairly historically accurate. However after about 150 pages the book began to lag and never really picked up again. I read some reviews when I just started to read the book and I thought that they were a bit harsh, b/c at that point I was enjoying the book quite a bit. Turns out that those folks were right and I just hadn't read far enough. The book was way too long for the content, or at
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Feb 05, 2009
After tackling Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ (The Gospel According to the Son), Lee Harvey Oswald, Picasso, Muhammad Ali, and others, Norman Mailer claimed that an insistent muse led him to the story of Hitler's childhood. His first book in 10 years received mix reviews. Supporters opined that no matter how distasteful his subject, Mailer still exerts a powerful, mesmerizing hold on his readers. Detractors, however, cited a clumsy Freudian hypothesis (Hitler as possibly the offspring of father-da
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Feb 04, 2012
Steven
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The book is about the development of young Adolph Hitler as told by a servant of the devil who recounts the early years of Adolph's family with far more time spent on Adolph's family than Adolph. The concept and the writing are very good, but there are problems in the delivery. While there are some motivations explaining Adolph's development, I felt that the author did not succeed in providing a full sense of that development; I felt as if it were more true that Adolph was a bad person because i
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Feb 11, 2008
Aubrey
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I couldn't finish this book. A tale of Hitler as a youth, Norman Mailer takes a compelling subject and adds his own bit of fantastic and supernatural drama in a disjointed way, which ends up taking away from the story, rather than adding to it. Not serious enough to be a fictionalized biography, and not fun enough to be a fantasy novel, I didn't know what to do with it and have put it down for good.
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Aug 05, 2011
August
rated it:
I've been intrigued by Mailer ever since reading parts of his fascinating essay collection The Spooky Art, but this is the first time I've read one of his novels to the end. I was sometimes during the reading of this novel indirectly reminded of Philip Roth's Plot against America. Apart from any outward similarities (the venerable age of the authors, both novels historical ones and both dealing with Hitler/Nazism to an extent) I also noted that Mailer's sentences, much like P. Roth's, are devo
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Sep 30, 2009
Jillian
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Pure stubbornness is the only reason that I finished _The Castle in the Forest_. Mailer presents young Hitler as a simpleton Freud enthusiast might: all mother love, sexual transgression, and anus cleaning. The novel opens with a lengthy discussion about Hitler's genealogy and inbreeding. I've read a number of interesting and even sympathetic tales of incest; this was not one of them. We get to watch Hitler's father sleeping with anyone he can get his hands on and his "hound" into, wit
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Aug 06, 2011
Niko
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Mailer tunnetusti uskalsi haukata isoja paloja ja tehdä kirjoilleen kattavaa taustatyötä. Hänen viimeiseksi jäänyt kirja on satiirinen kuvaus Adolf Hitlerin nuoruusvuosista paholaisen kertomana. Tarina lähtee aina Adolfin isovanhemmista ja jatkuu Adolfin syntymän kautta varhaisnuoruuteen.
600-sivuisen teoksen kahlaaminen vaati kyllä pitkäjänteisyyttä ja sitä odottamaani satiiria jäin kaipaamaan. Lähes kaksisataa sivua Adolfin isän Aloisin mehiläistenhoidon kuvausta oli puuduttavaa (vaikka ymmärrä More...
600-sivuisen teoksen kahlaaminen vaati kyllä pitkäjänteisyyttä ja sitä odottamaani satiiria jäin kaipaamaan. Lähes kaksisataa sivua Adolfin isän Aloisin mehiläistenhoidon kuvausta oli puuduttavaa (vaikka ymmärrä More...
May 13, 2009
Tim
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What impression does Norman Mailer's first novel in more than a decade leave? It's probably irony. Promoted as an exploration of the struggle between good and evil, The Castle in the Forest comes off making Adolf Hitler, a poster child of evil, little more than relatively commonplace. In addition, while Mailer writes as well as ever, his talents largely serve to make staying with a relatively plodding story less trying.[return][return]Mailer's novel purports to use Hitler's life from birth to
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Nov 27, 2008
Mardel
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I enjoyed reading this book, although it was admittedly a little difficult to get started and I can completely understand the some of the criticisms. Although the novel is supposedly about the youth of Hitler and he became the person whom history remembers, I really felt that the young Adolf was the least interesting part of the book. Knowing what we know about history, and given modern theories of psychological development, there was nothing particularly new or revelatory about that part of t
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Aug 28, 2011
Yair
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Very good book. Much like what I've heard about Mailer, it's bold, arrogant bordering on hubris, but unlike many authors who talked big yet created works that left me feeling oddly unfulfilled and even a bit cheated, this book by Mailer (his last before his death) left me very much in his grasp as reader to writer.
His word choice is superb, his dialogue at times outlandish and hilarious, descriptions are telling and, like the dialogue, can be perversely funny. Adolph Hitler and his origins (in More...
His word choice is superb, his dialogue at times outlandish and hilarious, descriptions are telling and, like the dialogue, can be perversely funny. Adolph Hitler and his origins (in More...
Jul 13, 2011
The late Norman Mailer’s last book, the 465-page A Castle in the Forest, released by Random House in 2007, the year he died, is a fictional exploration into the psychic life of Adolf Hitler, and an ambitious attempt to track the nature how a monstrous evil can germinate in a rather ordinary-looking and academically challenged Austrian youth.
Judging by all the books he lists in the bibliography, Mailer has apparently done a whale of a lot of research into Adolph Hitler’s early life. In A More...
Judging by all the books he lists in the bibliography, Mailer has apparently done a whale of a lot of research into Adolph Hitler’s early life. In A More...
May 19, 2009
Anna
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This was a really odd and disturbing book and not for the faint of heart. A lot of detailed sexual matters involved. Told in third person from an agent of the Maestro (Satan) who delves into his instruction & interventions of evil influences on Adolph Hitler, from before his birth through his years at school. A rather difficult premise, which held my attention, even though there were times that I felt physically ill from the descriptions the author, Norman Mailer, used throughout the book.
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