The Castle in the Forest
£1.75
Fascinating but lacking a clear rationale - I regard Norman Mailer very highly. His prose style is authorative and carefully chosen for affect. One feels the craft of countless hours of reflection and experience as descriptions and human enigmas are etched. However, I often feel at the end of his novels that something is missing or that I have missed the esential ingredient. It is frustrating.This novel is ambitious in its approach to the near mythical origins of Hitler. Mailer successfully portrays the family as full of the normal frailities that may well have been prevalent in this part of Austria at this time - incest, violence, small ambitions, the heartbreak of infant mortality. Throughout, Alois Hitler, Adolf s father, is uppermost. Through his exploits and musings, we gain more of an insight into the times than we do a putative rationale for the adult Hitler.The choice of narrator is also fascinating, providing an interesting aside on the battle between good and evil. I recommend this book as long as the reader is not expecting existential truths about Hitler. It is thought provoking and a fitting finale for Mailer s talents.
The Castle in the Forest - The Castle in the Forest is a book about Adolf Hitler s family. It starts out almost as a documentary, when the narrator, who at first tells us he is an SS-officer, is sent to Spital in Austria in the 1930 s to investigate Adolf Hitler s ancestry. Once the story of the family starts, the style shifts to that of a very readable novel, though the first chapters are so full of incest, that it is a bit disgusting.Even though I enjoyed the book most of the time, I came out feeling a bit disappointed. I picked up this book because I was very curious what Norman Mailer would write about Adolf Hitler and the person he became. It promised to be a revealing novel, but it was only an account of one of the theories about Hitler s ancestry in which the protagonist was Hitler s father Alois.Also, the hand of the supernatural was ever present in the lives of the Hitlers and it can hardly be plausible to conclude that the interference of the devil was the possible cause for Hitler s hatred and the atrocities he came to commit when he was in power. Perhaps the book has not been correctly presented as the synopsis promises that the author would `respond to these and other crucial aspects of Hitler s personality . I don t know what Mailer s intention with this book was, but it couldn t possibly be an explanation of Hitler s personality. So what was the point Mailer was trying to make? Whatever that was, I didn t get it.I also regret that despite the outstanding writing skills of the author, and the fact that I found the novel intriguing, sometimes I found it hard to enjoy it because no matter what I read about the family, I could not set aside my feelings about Hitler and the monstrosities he committed. I could not seem to overcome the repulsion to really enjoy this work of fiction.
No The Naked and the Dead - A strange book about the Hitler/Heidler/Schicklgruber family and an imagined supernatural guidance on the early development of AH. Not so much an examination of the nature of evil as an entirely fanciful imagining of what evil might be. I found this book unsatifying and, for me, it seemed to stop in mid air - think I must have missed something.
Just Could Not Put It Down - Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner s Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.Perhaps only someone of Norman Mailer s stature in the literary world could take on the task of writing such a book, even though it is a work of fiction. Initially I had to steel myself to read it. Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, I can read avidly about them all, as they are from the dim and distant past. But to read about Adolf Hitler a man who was still alive in my early childhood, the man who killed my father-in-law and many other brave men and women like him, as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself, seemed almost sacrilegious. Why would I want to read about the man, who above all others in world history, both ancient and modern caused the deaths of countless thousands of people for no other reason than is own psychotic delusions of greatness as the leader of what he hoped would be a master race.As I started the book I still had my doubts about whether I really wanted to read it. I was worried that the book would tend to glorify the man, simply by its existence, but by the time I had read forty or fifty pages I was hooked and it had become a must read, a book I could not put down. The book sets out to explore the evil of the most cruel man the world has ever known. Narrated by a mysterious SS man the story gives us young Adolf, from birth. Also the lives of his father and mother and his sisters and brothers. It also gives the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence. The book gives an insight into the struggle of good and evil that exists in all of us.
Fiction of an oblivion - Concise and giving in his narrative, Norman Mailer has touched upon the period of Hitler s life least spoken of in a sea of biographies and academic works written. The childhood of a would-be Monster or an already-was Monster? Perhaps he s trying to answer to the forever remaining question one is left after learning about Hitler: How could God put such a Despot amongst humanity? Or was it Him? Or the Satan?While Mailer s novel is rich in details of Hitler s childhood and the miserbale conditions people used to live in at the end of the 19th century and how the evil and noble spirit/messenger/angels were brooding around for souls to save and/or destroy, the one question that remained intact althroughout was weather Mr Mailer was blaming it all on the Devil, e.g. the Maestro for having inspired evil into baby Adolf through his dreams... A human tragedy of such a scale, with consequences yet being repelled, Hitler s actions were not because of religious upbringing or the lack of it. Call me a feminist, but all the male writers and eventually the reviewers below fail to notice that it s the miserable circumstances of social upbringing that consume the human spirit and sometimes make of them monsters or marvellous leaders. To raise Hitler to a level of pedestal where the evil and good were fighting for his soul, is too much of a tribute to an otherwise ordinary criminal whose mind coupled with psychosomatic underdevelopment did not contain space for anything spiritual. He was a being in great disharmony that neither God nor his opponent were urged to save. His actions were so horrendous that at the time it seems the extraterrestial Good and Evil joined in forces to mainatain damage control...As a fiction, it s a swift read, so, yes, buy it and read it, but don t blame yourselves when feeling you missed the point. Maybe that s the essence of Mailer s much praised (and deservedly so) writing.