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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Loser’s Loser: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Loser’s Loser (view source)
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Oswald’s Tale often shows Mailer at his best, which means that reading it has many rewards. Mailer and his associate Larry Schiller were able to obtain a large amount of KGB material, including tapes from the bugged apartment in Minsk where Oswald lived and where he began his life with Marina. | Oswald’s Tale often shows Mailer at his best, which means that reading it has many rewards. Mailer and his associate Larry Schiller were able to obtain a large amount of KGB material, including tapes from the bugged apartment in Minsk where Oswald lived and where he began his life with Marina. | ||
This was probably facilitated by the fact that Minsk, Oswald’s Soviet residence, fell to the independent state of Belarus after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the local authorities acquired the KGB’s records. Using them and interviews he recorded with various people who knew Oswald during his period in Moscow and Minsk, Mailer provides a vivid sense of life in the former Soviet Union circa 1960. If it was not nasty, brutish, and short, it was certainly cheerless and dull. | |||
This narrative is about as sympathetic to Oswald as anything published. Marguerite Oswald, the neurotic, narcissistic woman who raised him in her image, makes several memorable appearances. Oswald’s dyslexia is discussed, and the degree to which that disorder can trap an intelligent person in the appearance of incoherency and deeply embitter him. Mailer throughout argues convincingly for Oswald’s intelligence, in spite of the man’s subliterate journals and correspondence. | |||
The recorded accounts, balanced by the author’s novelistic style, make it impossible not to feel sorry for this very young man—barely twenty—with his spite and naiveté and childish pride, adrift in the utterly foreign, Orwellian landscape of post-Stalinist Russia. Even an intelligent paranoid like Oswald could scarcely have imagined the degree of official scrutiny to which he was subject during this period. Suspecting a CIA plant, the KGB followed him relentlessly, analyzed tapes of his recorded conversations, received regular reports from informers among his associates, and even drilled a peephole commanding a view of his apartment from an adjoining flat to supplement the bug already installed. Eventually this gave them insight, not to say oversight, into the honeymoon period of Oswald’s marriage. | |||
Meanwhile, Oswald did his best to look at the bright side, kept up his journal, and took an assigned job at the Minsk radio factory, where his performance was lackadaisical enough to cause negative comment. A lonely, | |||
fatherless mama’s boy, he searched for a nurturing woman and came up with Marina, who, according to interviews quoted by Mailer, may or may not have been a one-time Leningrad hooker but who was definitely a canny soul and tough cookie in search of security and respectability. For that, Lee was hardly her man but her survival skills would be drawn upon severely. In being sympathetic to Lee, Oswald’s Tale is also sympathetic to Marina and presents her side of the story. For Marina’s version of events, Mailer uses interviews with Marina taped during the 1970s by Larry Schiller and also Priscilla McMillan’s book Marina and Lee. | |||