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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 approximately age 16 as a vehicle to explore the nature of evil. Yet most of the book focuses on Hitler's father, Alois, including his uncertain parentage and the extent to which that rendered Adolf "a First-Degree Incestuary." Throw in extensive discussion of beekeeping, a lengthy diversion about the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and a seeming fascination with excrement and sex and you begin to wonder where the battle between good and evil went.[return][return]The story is told by D.T., a middle-ranking demon among Satan's minions. He is called D.T. because, when we first meet him, he inhabits the body of an SS intelligence officer named Dieter. Satan, usually called "the Maestro" or occasionally "the Evil One," assigned the as yet unborn Adolf as D.T.'s client, a "project" D.T. is to monitor. Yet the ultimate message seems to be that those imbued with evil of Hitlerian proportions are born with it and what occurs in their formative years merely fine tunes and reinforces the necessary traits.[return][return]Balance of review at http://prairieprogressive.com/?p=967
I get it. Hitler was the most despicable, vile being that has walked the earth. I didn't need to listen to all the depravity to prove that to me. I enjoyed Mailer's opus The Executioner's Song. I thought he took a human who had done terrible things and provided some context, garnering some sympathy. It reminded me a bit of the squirmy feeling after reading Lolita.
This, however, just left me frustrated, angry and I don't see how anyone can get a decent human to feel any sympathy, empathy or any emotion except disgust toward Hitler. I can't fathom what made Mailer go in this direction. It wasn't well-conceived or well-executed.
This, however, just left me frustrated, angry and I don't see how anyone can get a decent human to feel any sympathy, empathy or any emotion except disgust toward Hitler. I can't fathom what made Mailer go in this direction. It wasn't well-conceived or well-executed.
Finally forced my way through this one after several attempts. Not great.
Here's a review I wrote for the Boston Phoenix:
The sound and the Führer
Mailer takes on young Adolf
By PETER KEOUGH | January 31, 2007
070126_mailer_main
FIRST PERSON: The author’s theories of Good and Evil may not always convince, but his rollicking, ribald, grave-reeking voice does.
Having taken on such larger-than-life figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, Pablo Picasso, Jesus Christ, and, of course, Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer now essays “the most mysterious human being of the century,” Adolf Hitler. What to say about this incarnation of evil about whom so much already has been written? (The Castle in the Forest’s bibliography runs seven pages and ranges from Paradise Lost to Eva Crane’s The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting.) What perspective, what muse, what voice could one summon?
Mailer finesses his old ambivalence between the first- and third-person point of view by concocting a kind of first-person omniscient narrator. “Dieter,” who also goes by the suggestive initials “D.T.,” is a sardonic, cynical, Rabelaisian “member of a matchless Intelligence group.” Not the CIA of Harlot’s Ghost; more like the SS. Heinrich Himmler, it seems, had a theory of greatness. It lay in incest, which compounds both good and bad hereditary tendencies, creating gods or monsters, or one in the same. Could the Führer, the greatest of all men, have such Blutschande in his background?
As one of Himmler’s agents, Dieter investigates Hitler’s dicy genealogy. He dismisses straight off the canard that Adolf’s grandfather was a Jew. Instead, he determines that Hitler’s mother, Klara, was the offspring of Alois and Alois’s sister. No wonder Adolf only had one testicle!
TopicsNorman Mailer•Adolf Hitler•Jesus Christ•more >>
The Castle in the Forest is, then, as much about the father as about the son. And what a fascinating mediocrity (the banality of evil, or evil’s instrument, need not be boring), as he plows his side whiskers through three wives, innumerable mistresses, several tiers of the Austrian civil service, at least seven children, and a few beehives, ending his life a consummate, brutish bourgeois and, in his own words, a “fine fellow.”
Needless to say, young Adi didn’t agree. But we don’t even get to his diabolical conception until page 68, and when the book leaves off, he’s just an anal, idle, nascently megalomaniacal but not yet anti-Semitic little shit of 13. We learn how his beloved mother cleaned his asshole, how he organized war games with the local kids, how he was initiated into something dank and demonic by a hermit in the woods, how his experiments in masturbation inspired his toothbrush moustache. Unremarkable, and yet . . .
For one thing, he has Dieter as a narrator, and Mailer’s assurance that devils and angels involve themselves in every aspect of human existence, especially when it comes to death and procreation. The theories of Good and Evil, God and Satan, history and fiction, don’t always convince, but the Mittel-Europaisch melodrama, with its Grimm-like uncanniness and the author’s rollicking, ribald, grave-reeking voice, does. And though Mailer’s effusiveness can get tangled in mixed metaphors (“The stench of a baby born to die in its first weeks of life settled into Klara’s nose as if her nostrils were another limb of memory”), there are also eloquent passages like this one about a dying dog: “Luther now looked like a young dog again, and some indefinable self-esteem had returned as if he had always been more beautiful than anyone had realized, and could have become a great warrior if it had been asked of him. . . . ”
And Adolf’s love of dogs? There’s nothing in this book. Here’s hoping for a sequel.
The sound and the Führer
Mailer takes on young Adolf
By PETER KEOUGH | January 31, 2007
070126_mailer_main
FIRST PERSON: The author’s theories of Good and Evil may not always convince, but his rollicking, ribald, grave-reeking voice does.
Having taken on such larger-than-life figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, Pablo Picasso, Jesus Christ, and, of course, Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer now essays “the most mysterious human being of the century,” Adolf Hitler. What to say about this incarnation of evil about whom so much already has been written? (The Castle in the Forest’s bibliography runs seven pages and ranges from Paradise Lost to Eva Crane’s The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting.) What perspective, what muse, what voice could one summon?
Mailer finesses his old ambivalence between the first- and third-person point of view by concocting a kind of first-person omniscient narrator. “Dieter,” who also goes by the suggestive initials “D.T.,” is a sardonic, cynical, Rabelaisian “member of a matchless Intelligence group.” Not the CIA of Harlot’s Ghost; more like the SS. Heinrich Himmler, it seems, had a theory of greatness. It lay in incest, which compounds both good and bad hereditary tendencies, creating gods or monsters, or one in the same. Could the Führer, the greatest of all men, have such Blutschande in his background?
As one of Himmler’s agents, Dieter investigates Hitler’s dicy genealogy. He dismisses straight off the canard that Adolf’s grandfather was a Jew. Instead, he determines that Hitler’s mother, Klara, was the offspring of Alois and Alois’s sister. No wonder Adolf only had one testicle!
TopicsNorman Mailer•Adolf Hitler•Jesus Christ•more >>
The Castle in the Forest is, then, as much about the father as about the son. And what a fascinating mediocrity (the banality of evil, or evil’s instrument, need not be boring), as he plows his side whiskers through three wives, innumerable mistresses, several tiers of the Austrian civil service, at least seven children, and a few beehives, ending his life a consummate, brutish bourgeois and, in his own words, a “fine fellow.”
Needless to say, young Adi didn’t agree. But we don’t even get to his diabolical conception until page 68, and when the book leaves off, he’s just an anal, idle, nascently megalomaniacal but not yet anti-Semitic little shit of 13. We learn how his beloved mother cleaned his asshole, how he organized war games with the local kids, how he was initiated into something dank and demonic by a hermit in the woods, how his experiments in masturbation inspired his toothbrush moustache. Unremarkable, and yet . . .
For one thing, he has Dieter as a narrator, and Mailer’s assurance that devils and angels involve themselves in every aspect of human existence, especially when it comes to death and procreation. The theories of Good and Evil, God and Satan, history and fiction, don’t always convince, but the Mittel-Europaisch melodrama, with its Grimm-like uncanniness and the author’s rollicking, ribald, grave-reeking voice, does. And though Mailer’s effusiveness can get tangled in mixed metaphors (“The stench of a baby born to die in its first weeks of life settled into Klara’s nose as if her nostrils were another limb of memory”), there are also eloquent passages like this one about a dying dog: “Luther now looked like a young dog again, and some indefinable self-esteem had returned as if he had always been more beautiful than anyone had realized, and could have become a great warrior if it had been asked of him. . . . ”
And Adolf’s love of dogs? There’s nothing in this book. Here’s hoping for a sequel.
I realize it was about Hitler's youth, but it was full of the nastiness of life...hard to know how much was based in historical fact -- maybe all, maybe none.
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 least how Mailer decided to present the content. The bee stuff took too much time and was kind of pointless and drawn out and the whole idea of good vs evil, devil vs angel thing was not very well thought out and kind of a waste of time as well. That's not a good sign for the book b/c between these two topics there wasn't a whole lot more (besides the pointless chapter on the Tsar and Tsarina), which was interesting but not related to the story at all. I think that the devil thing was an easy way to present the conflict of good and evil in Hitler and in all of us and was a lame way to try and attempt this. It was more interesting for me to think of Hitler as a child, innocent like all children, and then think about his transformnation into the person we think of when someone says his name. This book was a waste of time to read and could have been a lot better if it had continued as it started, a fairly historically accurate of Hitler's family and his youth. The only reason I read the whole thing was b/c by the time it started to get slow I was already a good chunk of the way in and I continued to read hoping it would return to content as interesting as the beginning. It never did. I have read two other books by Mr. Mailer and I really enjoyed them ("The Executioners Song" and "The Naked and the Dead"). This book was a disappointment. If you want to read something good (@ least in my opinion) by Norman Mailer read the two previously mentioned books, if you want to read something bad by him, read this!
“What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no true answers—there are only questions.”
Would not recommend this book to anyone unless they want to think of rosebuds and opals their entire lives. Originally was going to give it one star however, as someone who rates books on a scale of how much they impacted me I was forced to up the star.
Would not recommend this book to anyone unless they want to think of rosebuds and opals their entire lives. Originally was going to give it one star however, as someone who rates books on a scale of how much they impacted me I was forced to up the star.
I've never read screwtape letters, but I assume Castle in the Forrest is a darker dirtier book. It was an interesting idea of how evil influences people. An interesting look at Hitler's youth. I listened to an abridged version of it, so I'm bummed I don't know what I missed, but I don't want to go back and listen to a full version. I heard it was going to be a trilogy, but then mailer died...
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes