Product Description

No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant, varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span of more than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects ranging from World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagon to Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to Jesus Christ. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler.

The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well as Hitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence.

A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in the Forest delivers its playful twists and surprises with astonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis that propels this novel and makes it a work of stunning originality. Now, on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #253538 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-16
• Released on: 2007-10-16
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Mailer did Jesus in The Gospel According to the Son; now he plumbs the psyche of history's most demonic figure in this chilling fictional chronicle of Hitler's boyhood. Mailer tells the story through the eyes of Dieter, a devil tasked by Satan (usually called the Maestro) with fostering Hitler's nascent evil, but in this study of a dysfunctional 19th-century middle-class Austrian household, the real presiding spirit is Freud. Young Adolph (often called Adi) is the offspring of an incestuous marriage between a coarse, domineering civil servant and a lasciviously indulgent mom. The boy duly develops an obsession with feces, a fascination with power, a grandiose self-image and a sexually charged yen for mass slaughter (the sight of gassed or burning beehives thrills him). Dieter frets over Hitler's ego-formation while marveling at the future dictator's burning gaze, his ability to sway weak minds and the instinctive führerprinzip that emerges when he plays war with neighborhood boys—talents furthered by Central Europe's ambient romantic nationalism. Mailer's view of evil embraces religions and metaphysics, but it's rooted in the squalid soil of toilet-training travails and perverted sexual urges. The novel sometimes feels like a psychoanalytic version of The Screwtape Letters, but Mailer arrives at a somber, compelling portrait of a monstrous soul. (Jan. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by William Boyd

The prospect of this novel is enticing: Norman Mailer on Adolf Hitler. Mailer, who has fearlessly, full-throatedly tackled Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Lee Harvey Oswald, Picasso, Muhammad Ali and Gary Gilmore (among others), seemed to be taking on his biggest confrontation yet. This hefty book from an iconic American man of letters, now in his 84th year, seemed to promise that the familiar Mailerian audacity was in fine fettle. I wondered if, here, he might just match his masterwork, The Executioner's Song.

The Castle in the Forest is a baffling, meandering, self-indulgent curio of a book -- at moments brilliantly insightful and fascinating but more often prompting jaw-dropping incredulity.

Mailer has decided to investigate Hitler's immediate family: his father, Alois, his mother, Klara, their relatives and his siblings. The period covered is approximately 1837 to 1903, the lifespan of Hitler's father. When Alois died, Adolf was 14 years old, still a sub-average schoolboy. So far, so straightforward. But Mailer is not content with a third-person, historical account of the antecedents and early life of perhaps the most vicious man who has walked this Earth: He has decided instead to have his novel narrated by a devil. A middle-ranking devil, moreover -- not Satan himself ("The Evil One" or "The Maestro," as he's termed here), but a devil who has the Maestro's ear and whom we know as Dieter.

The Castle in the Forest has its own freakish cosmology -- one I found most uncongenial, not having any belief in supernatural beings of any category. You cannot read this novel without encountering passages such as: "Spirits like myself can attend events where they are not present. I was in another place, therefore, on the night Adolf was conceived. Yet I was able to ingest the exact experience by calling upon the devil (of lower rank) who had been in Alois' bed on the primal occasion. . . . A minor devil can, on the most crucial occasions, implore the Evil One to be present with him during the climax. (The Maestro encourages us to speak of him as the Evil One when he does choose to enter sexual acts, and on that occasion, he was certainly there.)" The book is replete with these asides. The tone is arch and pompous; the dialogue throughout reads as if badly translated from rudimentary German.

Mailer, in a long career full of bravura risk-taking (think Ancient Evenings and Harlot's Ghost), has taken perhaps his biggest risk ever. And yet his intention is not merely to suggest that Hitler is "the spawn of the devil" -- nothing so facile. When we strip away the toe-curling mumbo-jumbo of all this diabolism, a sober and thoroughly researched thesis is being proposed here: Hitler was the product of a fuming stew of routine peasant incest in rural Austria; his mother was at once Alois Hitler's niece and his daughter, the product of a random sex act between Alois and his half-sister Johanna.

The supposition is entirely possible and has been mooted by Hitler scholars. There is no firm evidence, but novelists need no firm evidence: They are free to go where academics, historians and journalists dare not tread. And much of what is buried in this maddening novel is highly engaging -- most notably the portrait of Hitler's father. Indeed, the book is far more about Alois than Adolf, and it's in the sustained depiction of this boorish, fornicating, self-important, minor provincial customs official that Mailer's great strengths as a novelist shine: his feeling for character and detail, his empathy for the unworthy and the sly, his wit. Like a sculptor facing the lumpy, daunting block of marble that is The Castle in the Forest, the reader wants desperately to hew out the real, serious novel that is hidden within.

Mailer knows Hitler's life intimately (as do I, having spent a year writing a six-hour film drama of his rise to power), and his insights and intuition into how that warped mind was influenced and grew are genuinely intriguing, if occasionally a bit too apt. Hitler was insane -- incontrovertibly, I would say -- and his mania may well be explained (as might his alleged solitary testicle) by the complex incestuous web of his parentage. But in this novel, the ludicrous superstructure of devils and angels obfuscates the argument most damagingly.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
Mailer grabs your attention immediately with his main character, a devil serving high in the ranks of Satan who is present at Adolph Hitler's inception and is charged with overseeing his childhood. Mailer maintains interest with glorious writing, fastidious detailing and research, and intriguing philosophical underpinnings about the order of Hell, Heaven, and Earth. Harris Yulin's narration carries the proper authoritarian tones for the narrator, humanizing him enough to lend believability to his potential unreliability. Yulin's guttural portrayal of Hitler's licentious, bullying father sheds light on the boy's development of uncomfortable sexual practices and need for power. His tones for Hitler's mother are softer, and her indulgences further clarify confusions about feces and sibling preferences that might easily pervert a young psyche. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Diary of a Madman
In this ambitious novel on the formative years of Adolf Hitler, author Norman Mailer delivers a tour-de-force by delving into the dysfunctional family and very bizarre habits that molded this dictator and murderer of millions.

Told through the burning gaze and biting commentary of Dieter, a devil who was given the task by the Maestro (Satan), the years of 1837-1903 are covered, with an emphasis on Adolf's father, Alois, a customs official whose home every night is truly the bed he places his shoes under, and mother, Klara, who is Alois's niece and daughter.

Adolf is shown at his most diabolical as he manipulates his doting mother, molds youngsters who are willing to follow his every command and glows with glory while winning at all costs in games of war.

This is a middle-class Austrian home that would make Freud blush and decide to flee into another profession. That it is ultimately a diary of a madman up to the age of 14 makes it a brilliant, disturbing story.

This Castle Has MANY Rooms!
By many rooms, I mean this novel is filled with shocking cruelty and gentleness, cruel abhorrence and love, sensuality and abominations, adultery and conviction. So many contradictions! To this reader, it is at once interesting and also unforgettably disgusting.
This book is unusual in that it is narrated by the devil himself. But then, who could be a better biographer than him for Hitler? This novel is difficult to endure in its stark portrayal of evil at its utmost. In spite of this, the book is interesting, if you can take it.

King of the castle
This was the first book by Norman Mailer that I have read. I must state up front that I purposefully paid close attention in this book to his style, his prose and his wit. I enjoyed it all. For those of you who have read other Mailer works, I have nothing to compare it to unfortunately. I can only say that it is one of the best books I have read in some time. I thoroughly enjoyed his ability to step out of the story and preach, if you will, about what is fate and what isn't. How much control we have over ourselves if there are in fact cudgels and demons afoot. I can't find one thing bad to say except for his brief departure from the main story to tell the story of the Tsar Nicholas - it was nice and again well written, but I personally didn't feel that it added anything to the novel's overall theme or narrator's voice. Overall, I would recommend this book.