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The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Castle Mailer: Difference between revisions
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{{Quote box|title=''The Castle in the Forest''|By [[Norman Mailer]]<br />New York: Random House, 2007<br />477 pp. Cloth $27.95.|align=right|width=25%}} | {{Quote box|title=''The Castle in the Forest''|By [[Norman Mailer]]<br />New York: Random House, 2007<br />477 pp. Cloth $27.95.|align=right|width=25%}} | ||
{{Byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{Byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr01beg}} | ||
In the unpublished portion of a 1983 interview, Norman Mailer stated that trying to understand Nazism was “one of the great questions” of the twentieth century. “No one is rewarded for approaching that question,” he explained, “because those horrors are in all of us, and there to be tapped. We draw back from that as a conclusion about human nature. We don’t really want to know the answer | {{start|In the unpublished portion of a 1983 interview,}} Norman Mailer stated that trying to understand Nazism was “one of the great questions” of the twentieth century. “No one is rewarded for approaching that question,” he explained, “because those horrors are in all of us, and there to be tapped. We draw back from that as a conclusion about human nature. We don’t really want to know the answer . . . because the answer may be terrible.” Norman Mailer, at 84, survivor of World War II, of the American Century, and more recently of heart surgery, has, it seems, decided to tackle the big question, perhaps by now mellow in the knowledge that he shall not be rewarded for doing so. | ||
His last novel, ''[[The Gospel According to the Son]]'' (1996), sought to understand the childhood and early manhood of Jesus, survivor of King Herod’s holocaust. Mailer’s new novel ''[[The Castle in the Forest]]'' (Random House, 2007) creates a sort of diptych by attempting to understand the childhood of Jesus’ messianic obverse, Adolf Hitler. “I think he [Hitler] saw himself as a world leader,” Mailer told William F. Buckley Jr. in 1979, “and thought that he was bringing some kind of salvation to the world.” How did Hitler become the megalomaniac who fought to march humankind into the new world order of a fascist millennium? That is the underlying question of this provocative, complicated, digressive, sometimes frustrating, yet ample novel. | His last novel, ''[[The Gospel According to the Son]]'' (1996), sought to understand the childhood and early manhood of Jesus, survivor of King Herod’s holocaust. Mailer’s new novel ''[[The Castle in the Forest]]'' (Random House, 2007) creates a sort of diptych by attempting to understand the childhood of Jesus’ messianic obverse, Adolf Hitler. “I think he [Hitler] saw himself as a world leader,” Mailer told William F. Buckley Jr. in 1979, “and thought that he was bringing some kind of salvation to the world.” How did Hitler become the megalomaniac who fought to march humankind into the new world order of a fascist millennium? That is the underlying question of this provocative, complicated, digressive, sometimes frustrating, yet ample novel. | ||