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The Castle In The Forest
by Norman Mailer
The 83-year-old author's first novel in over ten years tells the story of Adolph Hitler's childhood.
Random House, 496 pages
01/23/2007
$27.95
ISBN: 0394536495
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Publishers Weekly
The novel sometimes feels like a psychoanalytic version of The Screwtape Letters, but Mailer arrives at a somber, compelling portrait of a monstrous soul. [6 Nov 2006, p.36]
New York Observer Philip Weiss
This work has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit...Blackly hilarious, beautifully written. [22 Jan 2007, p.1]
The New York Times Book Review Lee Siegel
This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. No wonder it is narrated by a devil. Mailer doesn't inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them.
The Guardian Beryl Bainbridge
Electrifying and peculiar.
The Independent Cal McCrystal
This is a vivid, eye-popping novel in which history throbs but fitfully, the devil enjoys a dominant role and the stream of narrative flows deviously over the jagged rocks of human mischief. Which is precisely the author's purpose.
Sydney Morning Herald Peter Wolfe
There's more than enough to admire in this juggernaut of a book.
Village Voice Gary Indiana
Everything in Hitler's life that Castle paints for us resonates with the sour music of chance, the Manichean flexibility of human will, and the mystery embedded in every creature.
San Francisco Chronicle Alan Cheuse
[The narrator]'s constantly making wonderfully suggestive asides about sin and reincarnation, about marriage and dreams, about art and excrement. And he's there when we need him, as in the monstrous conception of the Führer himself, a scene that may rival in its evil intensity the comic precedent of the conception of the author in Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy."
The Economist
His meticulous observations of family life can seem trite in comparison with the events soon to come. But just as often, these details compose a fascinating silhouette of a character that arguably shaped the 20th century more than any other.
Los Angeles Times Ron Hansen
As fascinating and deft as The Castle in the Forest is, it seems, at nearly 500 pages, only to have tilled the ground. Perhaps the harvest of this novelist's great talent and imagination will come in a necessary sequel.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
For all his excesses, Mailer paints an icy and convincing portrait of the dictator as a young sociopath, both prissy and sadistic, simultaneously sentimental and stupendously cruel.
The New Yorker
As a stylist, Mailer remains captivating, if sometimes infuriating, and he clearly relishes exploring taboo corners of his protagonist’s being—his coprophilia, the sexual pleasure he takes in acts of violence, his simultaneous guilt and thrill over his malignant behaviors. Yet, strangely, Hitler is overshadowed as a character by the more vividly realized personalities around him.
Library Journal Edward B. St. John
Deceptively dry. [1 Dec 2006, p.112]
Chicago Sun-Times John Barron
An audacious, preposterous and often delicious new novel...Give Mailer credit for taking a big swing and shining a light on a past that Hitler, himself, tried to hide. Yet, philosophically, we have come to expect something a little deeper from this author than "the devil made him do it."
Booklist Brad Hooper
Mailer is never an easy read; in this novel, as in all his fiction, subject matter, themes, and prose style make demands on readers' willingness or even ability to stay focused. [15 Nov 2006, p.6]
Wall Street Journal Thomas Mallon
A nervy and sometimes pratfallen story, both absorbing and absurd.
New York Review Of Books J. M. Coetzee
Keeping the paradox infernal–banalalive in all its anguishing inscrutability may be the ultimate achievement of this very considerable contribution to historical fiction.
The Observer Adam Mars-Jones
The book is highly impressive for long stretches, but its flaws are perverse and even preposterous. It dies the death of a thousand cuts from self-inflicted wounds to intelligibility, but the punctures are all in the insistent, maddeningly silly cosmological framework.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Stephen Abell
Regrettably, some of the flicker of intellectual excitement caused by such a novel concept is extinguished by the novel itself.
Washington Post William Boyd
A baffling, meandering, self-indulgent curio of a book -- at moments brilliantly insightful and fascinating but more often prompting jaw-dropping incredulity.
Houston Chronicle Charles Matthews
With a narrative that alternately plods and rambles, an absence of convincing psychological insight, and an oversupply of stale literary tricks, what Mailer's novel mostly demonstrates is the evil of banality.
Chicago Tribune William Pritchard
There is plenty of old-fashioned Mailerian preoccupation with excrement, the special quality of our hero's stool, and with smells in general, since we are born "inter faeces et urinam"--a remark "worthy of the best of devils," the narrator says.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Randy Boyagoda
Another ill-conceived, self-indulgent exercise from an aging writer who's never been shy of taking on Big Names with his particular combination of psychological speculation, eccentric mythology and historical hallucination...This is a Norman Mailer book, which means it's grandly ambitious, another wild swing at the fences, another long, loud, foul ball.
Boston Globe Roberta Silman
The book zigzags along in a somewhat chronological but ultimately messy and sometimes embarrassing way.
PopMatters Carlin Romano
Indeed, after such repeated priapic passages and plenty of scatological attention to “Adi’s pip-squeak of an anus” and “Adolf’s bowel movements,” one begins to feel that the Lech in Winter, the diaper-changer of nine, can’t pull himself away from sex and excretion to think about much else, even his official high historical agenda.
The New York Times Janet Maslin
For all the long-winded, claustrophobic intensity with which The Castle and the Forest dissects these matters, its conclusions turn out to have caca's sublety. With 467 pages of repetitive text, this is a big book with a jarring incongruity: its thinking is so small.
Daily Telegraph Lionel Shriver
[Mailer's] new novel, The Castle in the Forest, has now joined Windchill Summer on that elite tier of books that are so ghastly as to inspire something close to awe, and that have so blighted several days of my life with resentment, dread and mental nausea that forever after I bear their authors a personal grudge.
Daily Telegraph Jonathan Bate
Like something that the proverbial cat brought in. Something butchered and foul-smelling.
The New Republic Ruth Franklin
Nearly five hundred of the most revolting pages in recent American fiction...How could a writer as intelligent and original as Norman Mailer have digested this library of books and returned with the superficial, twisted, and finally just plain stupid vision of Hitler in this novel?
 The average user rating for this book is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 13 User Votes
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