Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fiction of an oblivion, 23 May 2007
Concise and giving in his narrative, Norman Mailer has touched upon the period of Hitler's life least spoken of in a sea of biographies and academic works written. The childhood of a would-be Monster or an already-was Monster? Perhaps he's trying to answer to the forever remaining question one is left after learning about Hitler: How could God put such a Despot amongst humanity? Or was it Him? Or the Satan?
While Mailer's novel is rich in details of Hitler's childhood and the miserbale conditions people used to live in at the end of the 19th century and how the evil and noble spirit/messenger/angels were brooding around for souls to save and/or destroy, the one question that remained intact althroughout was weather Mr Mailer was blaming it all on the Devil, e.g. the Maestro for having inspired evil into baby Adolf through his dreams... A human tragedy of such a scale, with consequences yet being repelled, Hitler's actions were not because of religious upbringing or the lack of it. Call me a feminist, but all the male writers and eventually the reviewers below fail to notice that it's the miserable circumstances of social upbringing that consume the human spirit and sometimes make of them monsters or marvellous leaders. To raise Hitler to a level of pedestal where the evil and good were fighting for his soul, is too much of a tribute to an otherwise ordinary criminal whose mind coupled with psychosomatic underdevelopment did not contain space for anything spiritual. He was a being in great disharmony that neither God nor his opponent were urged to save. His actions were so horrendous that at the time it seems the extraterrestial Good and Evil joined in forces to mainatain damage control...
As a fiction, it's a swift read, so, yes, buy it and read it, but don't blame yourselves when feeling you missed the point. Maybe that's the essence of Mailer's much praised (and deservedly so) writing.
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15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blood drama? Bloody good drama, 28 Feb 2007
There are those that suggest merely to look at a childhood photograph of Adolf Hitler is sacrilege. It is to search for innocence within the pale blue eyes, and from that comes a journey of reasoning and justification for later events.
Norman Mailer isn't a subscriber to such censorship, having entered Hitler's bloodline two generations before young Adi was born in 1889, and then sticking with the future Nazi leader's formative childhood years, in the narrative of his new book. What we find is a stinking cess pool of incest, petty thuggery, piety and rage - and that's well before the cataclysmic events described when Adolf is conceived by Alois Hitler and his wife, 'daughter' and niece, Klara.
The book begins with narrator DT introducing himself as an SS officer in 1930s Germany, but later identifying himself as a spirit agent of the Devil. Inspired by faded photographs and an extensive bibliography, Mailer lets his incredible, base imagination run wild from the 19th century Austrian `farmhouse trash' through to Adolf's adolescence.
However, Mailer, and DT, are far too cute to exaggerate any particular experiences that sealed Adolf's fate, and there is nothing to suggest he is the son of the Devil, as others have interpreted.
Adolf's early childhood is very normal, but he is skilfully manipulated by the devil in his mind to take the very worst from each incident - whether that be a beating, a slur from his parents, his pompous father's worries over being down in a deal or a school lesson on the Teutonic knights.
By the close, Adolf is in his teens and sexually aroused over his involvement in the death of both his younger brother and father. The devil is proud of his this fantastic tapestry of evil and filth he has created. It is a skill Mailer shares.
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13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just Could Not Put it Down, 9 Mar 2007
Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.
Perhaps only someone of Norman Mailer's stature in the literary world could take on the task of writing such a book, even though it is a work of fiction. Initially I had to steel myself to read it. Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, I can read avidly about them all, as they are from the dim and distant past. But to read about Adolf Hitler a man who was still alive in my early childhood, the man who killed my father-in-law and many other brave men and women like him, as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself, seemed almost sacrilegious. Why would I want to read about the man, who above all others in world history, both ancient and modern caused the deaths of countless thousands of people for no other reason than is own psychotic delusions of greatness as the leader of what he hoped would be a master race.
As I started the book I still had my doubts about whether I really wanted to read it. I was worried that the book would tend to glorify the man, simply by its existence, but by the time I had read forty or fifty pages I was hooked and it had become a must read, a book I could not put down. The book sets out to explore the evil of the most cruel man the world has ever known. Narrated by a mysterious SS man the story gives us young Adolf, from birth. Also the lives of his father and mother and his sisters and brothers. It also gives the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence. The book gives an insight into the struggle of good and evil that exists in all of us.
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