The Castle in the Forest (2007)

Interesting premise (devil observes life of young Hitler) but very bizarre and dull digressions. Lots of talk about piss and Nicholas II. Come on, Norman, you could've done better than this. ( )

Norman Mailer is one of those authors where it becomes explicitly clear what opinion he has and that only his should count. The Castle In The Forest is written in a demon's perspective. I wonder why. Is the subject Adolf Hitler so unspeakable off that he needed to use metaphors popular in the middle age? Or perhaps I just didn't get the idea behind it. There was also his extensive knowledge of bees he seemed to need to share. Another thing I didn't get. In the end a lot that seemed alien to me. ( )

There has always been something pre-Judeo-Christian about Norman Mailer's imagination. He has a Homeric sensibility that is also at home in ancient Egypt. Monotheism hardly appeals to the Manichean Mr. Mailer. So it does not surprise me that a devil masquerading as a member of the Nazi SS narrates Mr. Mailer's first novel in more than a decade, "The Castle in the Forest" (Random House, 496 pages, $27.95).

Modern psychology, Mr. Mailer implies, cannot account for the rise of Adolf Hitler. He has a point. There are many explanations for Hitler's rise to power, but no interpretation dominates the field. Mr. Mailer knows as much because he has poured over the contemporary literature on the Führer. The novelist appends an extensive bibliography to his work, even marking with an asterisk those books he drew on for inspiration and data.

But why the devil? Because no God-centered universe could possibly produce a Hitler, Mr. Mailer implies. Such evil is only conceivable in a divided cosmogony, in a contest between God and the E. O. (Mr. Mailer's acronym for the Evil One). For decades he has championed the idea of a seesaw conflict between the forces of good and evil. The devil in "The Castle in the Forest" is like one of those Ancient Greek gods who takes a special interest in a particular mortal and helps him out when it seems the human's strength of purpose may flag.

So Adolf — enabled but also enervated by mother-love — needs a dose of the devil to enhance his prospects. Those who know Mr. Mailer's life story might think of Fanny Mailer, the maternal sentinel who presided over her son's rise to fame. Needless to say, Mr. Mailer is not equating his experience with Hitler's, but he seems to be pursuing a parallel. Remember that Mr. Mailer is also the author of "Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man" (1995), another work that attempts to fathom the origins of the artist's power. Indeed, Mr. Mailer is fond of analogizing: "Put an artist on an artist," he asserts by way of justifying his unique take on Marilyn Monroe, whom he portrayed as consumed with Napoleonic ambition in "Marilyn" (1973). To explain Mr. Mailer's choice of Hitler, the best source is Mr. Mailer's confession in "Advertisements for Myself" (1959): "The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." That kind of megalomania belies the ambition required to undertake "The Castle in the Forest."

Norman Mailer's great contribution to American literature is his effort to encompass large subjects. His aspirations are so high that he is bound to fail by any conventional standards. As soon as the SS man explains he is a devil on assignment from the E. O., my interest in his story slackened. Making Hitler a product of evil, rather than an originator of same, is troubling — because it denies the force of evil any human agency.

Much of the novel is third-person narration recast in the voice of the devil. Mr. Mailer has often found speaking in the third person inauthentic because he could never accept the authority of an omniscient narrator. In "The Castle in the Forest," the author has neatly solved the problem by making the narrator's voice supernatural.

The biographer in me, though, rejects the devil and wants to know more about the devil's beard, the SS man. What happens among the congregation of the devils (it has to be kept vague, lest trade secrets become known) did not interest me — I felt I was due back on planet Earth. I responded with a virtual shrug, for example, to the secret that devils call angels "the cudgels."

And yet the richly imagined terrestrial details — the depiction of Adolf's father, Alois, for example — marvelously re-create the Hapsburg world. The sex scenes involving Alois have the ribald verve that is vintage Mailer — and more humor than you would expect in the novelist's evocation of the petty despotisms of domestic life.

Enjoy this novel for its deep learning and its well-wrought characters, if not for its factitious ontology. ( )

Our narrator is an SS man named Dieter, researching Hitler’s genealogy for Heinrich Himmler. However, as he reveals the secrets of Hitler’s family - Adolf was the product of incest, his sister was retarded, and so on – he reveals that he was present during Hitler’s childhood, because the SS man is actually a demon working for Satan himself. It was his duty to help mold young Hitler, the demon’s client “Adi”, for the Devil’s use by manipulating childhood events. He shares the intimate details from several years of the boy’s life, as Adi played war games with other boys, learned the art of beekeeping from a creepy child molester of a neighbor, and develops obsessions with power, death and feces.

I really didn’t like this book for a number of reasons. The crass vulgarity was the biggest reason. It seemed like every few pages someone was talking about either shit or sex. I suppose one could argue that these are the two huge components of human life and that the real wonder is why they don’t figure more prominently in more novels, but whatever. It’s gross! It seems worthwhile to mention here that this book did win an award – the 2007 Bad Sex Award from Literary Review. Trust me, it deserved it, as the winning passage will illustrate for you:

“Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.
The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!”
The whole book is written in this style, so I feel like I could end right here with a pretty clear justification for why listening this book was so painful. But there were plenty of other issues, too.

Actually, one of the biggest problems for me was the simple fact that the premise didn’t work. The revelation of the demonic nature of the narrator happens fairly early on, but it seems to come out of nowhere, and it never really gels with the main story. He doesn’t seem to directly interact with his “clients”, by and large, so all his various mentions of the Devil and the Dummkopf (the nickname Satan and his minions have bestowed upon God, apparently) serve no purpose in the story save to remind the reader that he’s there. I guess one could argue that this is how demons work – it’s not that they are active agents in the world so much as influencing events so subtly that one never notices them directly. But in this narrative, it doesn’t add a thing.

Lots of Freudian influence here in the way that Mailer/Dieter interpret the events of Hitler’s childhood.

This book reminded me a bit of The Little Book, another book I read that dealt with a lot of bad sex, incest and whatnot. It even had some Hitler thrown in. Not that the two books are the same at all – I just felt like they were aiming for the same audience, whoever that might be. Definitely not me. ( )

A devil of high rank tells the story of Adolf Hitler starting with the birth of his father, then the birth of his mother, and ending when Hitler is about 15.

Norman Mailer, or at least the devil narrating this work, has read way too much Freud. The ideas of oral and anal obsession are woven throughout the work, particularly focused on sexual encounters (with an emphasis on incest) and the presence of excrement. Since Adolf Hilter and Sigmund Freud were both Austrians, and contemporaries, the emphasis may have intentional. However, I still found it annoying. ( )