The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest
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Fannie Peczenik
Abstract: A close reading of the importance of place in Mailer’s last novel.
You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work. (Norman Mailer to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979)
When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.
Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about Castle in the Forest to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the New York Review. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of Castle in the Forest off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”