A serviço de sua satânica majestadeMuito já se leu que O Castelo na Floresta, último romance do gigante americano da ficção Norman Mailer, é uma biografia de Adolf Hitler. Não de todo. O pequeno Adolf está ausente ou tem pouca importância até depois da metade do livro, e a narrativa se ocupa mais...
Eine erzähltechnische Bankrotterklärung,die nur einem vollkommen unerfahrenen Autor mit den allerbesten Absichten gelingen kann. Beim Verhältnis des Umfangs dieses Wälzers im Vergleich zum Handlungsgehalt (der oben wieder gegebene Klappentext meiner Ausgabe lässt nichts aus) ist man als Leser so ...
This book is something. Yup, it surely is. The Executioner's Song is one of those oxymoronically-named "non-fiction novels." In a non-fiction novel - the classic of the genre being Truman Capote's In Cold Blood - a journalist takes his research as far as humanly possible, right up to the boundary...
I'm a huge Norman Mailer fan. (As an aside, let me just divulge something here. I have no idea, really, why I have a huge affinity for certain writers that are notoriously misogynistic in nature: Phillip Roth, John Updike, Mailer, to name a few. I don't consider myself a misogynist. I'm actually ...
A Novel HistoryThis loosely "fictionalised" account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war March on the Pentagon won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.While many of Mailer's political and philosophical concerns could be said to have dated (like much of Sixties culture), I really enjoyed r...
I can only tell you my experience of the book.It was knocking on the door of greatness. The beginning was staggering, and I was floored by the musicality of its sentences, its startling imagery, and the depth of thought that made these ancient Egyptians remind me, as others before me, of aliens i...
I recently read the late Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the American Political Conventions of 1968 and it’s interesting how nothing much has changed since Mailer wrote his coverage of the events leading to the 1968 U.S. presidential elections.Composed of co...
Flaws and ApplauseFor all its flaws (and they are both numerous and substantial), "The Deer Park" is still one of my favourite novels of the 1950's.It deals with two personal interests and obsessions: radical Left-wing politics in the United States from the 1930’s to the 1950’s (including the Hou...
My review ran in the San Jose Mercury News on February 2, 2003:As a student, I once found myself part of a group trying to make conversation with a writer-in-residence, Bernard Malamud. The talk reached several dead ends before Malamud mentioned that he had been asked to submit nominations for th...
Norman Mailer's ability to render the minutiae is astonishing. He writes like he's seen and done it all, and for the first two hundred pages I was having enough fun to cancel my plans for the weekend. The book starts with the main character, CIA agent Harry Hubbard, racing back to the titled isla...
Norman Mailer has had a radical trajectory through the course of his career, and now, at age 75 with fifty years as a professional writer behind him, a summary collection is the fashion, and The Time of Our Time is the door stopper through which posterity should judge either his ascension, or dec...
In this epic work, Norman Mailer shows the complexity that is Lee Harvey Oswald and leaves the reader to determine: Did he have the soul of a Killer? Mailer begins with Oswald’s trip to Russia and works backward through Oswald’s early family life, then forward with through his return to the US w...
Some thoughts upon rereading Norman Mailer’s, Of a Fire on the Moon.I graduated high school in June of 1969. I barely remember my graduation day, but I will never forget the evening of July 20, 1969, watching TV at a friend’s house on a hot and sticky night in Northern New Jersey when, at 10:18 p...
