The Castle in the Forest

The Castle in the Forest Astonishing Insight on the Nature Good and Evil This is a wonderful book to treasure and reflect upon. The precision of the writing makes it easy to read while the intensity of the psychological analysis gives the reader a lot to ponder. This book is a story of the development, creation and cultivation of pure evil. It is written from the perspective of a progenitor of evil. The narrator created evil on earth in a very amoral tone as if explaining directions to get to the grocery store. Norman Mailer shows banality of evil doers with the sharp style of a craftsman. The book is introspective and reflective without bogging down into sentimental fog and without ever becoming tedious. Mailer elevates the reader outside of the comfort zone and suspends them, as if he were in mid-air, to the very end of the book. Since the perspective is introspective and reflective it would have been very easy for it to have become tedious. Yet, not one page of the book seemed redundant, unnecessary or excessive in detail. Very little of the book is devoted to dialog. Mostly the reader is given the inner thoughts, rationalizations and motives of the characters. Yet the characters are very believable and all the more pitiful. The central theme of the book is the question of how any human being could become pure evil. This question is answered by presenting a very gradual cultivation of otherwise normal men by an outside force. Obviously the outside force is not necessary for evil to triumph. Mailer shows that the only prerequisites that are essential are excessive pride and a dose of ignorance. This book is provocative rather than comfortable; it opens more questions than it answers; and it can be offensive and demanding. Read it for all these reasons. Read this book.

Mailer never minces words, and his narrator D.T. doesn't either. What I found most remarkable was the strength of the story-telling as Mailer explored the nature of evil.

Everyone seems to get hung up on the notion that THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST is a biography of Adolph Hitler, but I'm not so sure that's the case. You can't read it as history nor gulp it down as absolute truth, both of which are relative, and yet the piece exists beyond the realm of simple fiction. To me the work is a speculation, a meditation on the complexities ... the "ineluctable modalities" of humanity. So, why center the narrative on Hitler? Because, I think, for Mailer's generation and for several since, that dark personality has been--continues to be--the symbol of a vast mystery (a "Mystery of Iniquity?"), which runs like a sinister undercurrent through the nature and history of the human race. Hitler is hapless. The real voice and purpose here comes to us through Dieter (DL). Pay attention to him. There hasn't been a more telling demon since Mephistopheles; however, Dieter has more power, coming at us from our own contemporary sense of self, and he's much more revealing than Faust's creation, for he speaks to us in a modern context. Let yourself sink into the narration, settle into the narrator's tortured spirit, listen to the subtlties and nuances, which some of us may be really hearing for the first time since Eve, so to speak. This tale is a deep well to which a reader can return often and always find something to nourish the mind and heart.

With the exception of THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, which I read because I found the subject matter fascinating, I have shunned Mailer's books. No matter that SONG was brilliant; it seemed that whenever I read about Mailer, he was either a) physically fighting someone or b) being raked through the coals by some intelligent reviewer. So I figured he must be a loony and a [...] and I didn't bother. A friend send me CASTLE IN THE FOREST, and, again, because I've read so much on Hitler, it seemed worth a try to see if Mailer had anything new to say on the subject. Does he ever! This is a brilliant book. Like most other people, I've been puzzled by the nature of Hitler's evil as long as I've known his name. Was he human? Was he demonic? Is there such a thing as evil? Or Satan? However you feel about the cosmology Mailer lays out in this book, there is no question that he makes Hitler and his evil completely accesible to the modern reader. This is no easy feat. Many have tried -- some of the most learned Nazi scholars. None have succeeded -- until now, until Mailer. He does here what great literature should do -- takes a real event and makes it emotionally felt through the power of his themes, ideas and words. As for me, I am anxious to catch up on all the Mailer I've been missing all these years. When I think about my previous attitudes towards Mailer and his work, the initials D.K. come to mind.

It has always been hard for people to find a balance when talking about Norman Mailer and his work. But it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to call a writer names, as a previous reviewer has, or to call all of the author's output garbage. (The review in question has, apparently, been removed or withdrawn as of 1/24) To address Norman Mailer realistically, readers have always had to accept that they would find extraordinary strengths and liabilities in the same work. Mailer's work and his persona, deeply intertwined for the past six decades, irritate the hell out of some people. Fine. But nobody's personal irritation wipes out an author's 60-year output. The Naked And The Dead, The Armies of The Night, The Executioner's Song, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Advertisements For Myself, to name only five, are major books of our time. Plainly the previous reviewer, in handing down such sweeping and unsupported dismissal of Mailer's work, is superior to the pinheads on the committees that awarded Mailer two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and countless other honors. Mailer's work is always a mixture of brilliance, clumsiness, audacity, dullness, and excitement. That is a big part of why he is so interesting -- the tension among these qualities. Some of these qualities are more pronounced in some of his works than in others. Many contemporary readers will find the premise of The Castle In The Forest outlandish -- the existence of a God and a Devil, and legions of lesser devils and angels, at war with each other, and intimately involved in human affairs. This notion is nothing new in Mailer's work, and he is completely serious about it. If you don't want to go with the premise, don't read the book. In this book about Hitler's early years, narrated, as readers probably know by now, by one of Satan's assistant devils, you will find many surprises, startling imagery, a deceptively subtle narrative strategy that yields more narrative torque than one might guess, long stretches that many readers will find tedious, many others that are striking and memorable and which could have come from no other writer, some laser-sharp flashes of action, some clunky missteps, and a lot of philosophizing. Many readers will find some of the philosophizing surprising and fresh and thrilling, and some of it obvious and self-congratulatory and irritating. Mailer is anything but predictable, and he takes this book's readers on a wild ride. What a great and rich show he puts on. If Mailer's ego puts you on edge, if you don't want to deal with the irritation you may feel in encountering uncomfortable ideas, or even foolish ideas right next to interesting and provocative ones, don't read the book. Mailer insists on throwing himself up against large questions that are obviously important to him, and that have been important to human culture down through the ages. His successes and his failures are themselves an epic. This book is an astonishing act of imagination, ga