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 playful way.

I liked the narrator of the book. Dietar is a SS officer, recruited bu Himmler to investigate this back story. However, in reality, Dietar is a demon and we have lots of playfulness on the nature of good and evil and how humans are pawns in the battle for our souls between good and bad. This works very well.

The book is an extraordinary slow pace - in 467 pages AH only gets to the age of 13.

A lot of the book is dedicated to AH father, Alois and his several wives and mistresses and his all moustachioed testostorone.

More bizarrely, around 25% of the book is dedicated to beekeeping - Alois obsession and one that he passes down to his sons. Not really sure of the symbolism of this - although the author often implies at symbolism within this book and then dashes the readers thoughts as being too obvious and directly discounting them for you.

This represents an oddity, as its very obviously part complete. It does stand up on its own, but leaves you and the story unfulfilled.