Thursday, May 24, 2007

Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer (2007)

The premise was great, and I had never read anything by Mailer, so I thought I would try this. Mailer looks at Hitler's youth and family in a fictional story, hoping to explain what made him so evil. The narrator is non other than a minion of Satan. So far so good and from a few things I mentioned to a friend who has studied Hitler and the Holocaust, looks like Mailer covered a lot of the controversies around Hitler's childhood and family - so it was probably well researched. What really got to me was Mailer's sense of the role Satan and his minions have played in historical events. He has his own elaborate definition of what is evil and how people get drawn into being Satan's pawns, and what the relationship is with God. It is not a Christian definition, but his own. I can respect that, but it made no sense to my ethical constructs and didn't further my understanding of evil - a concept I have struggled with at different times in my life. This didn't help. The historical figures got so tedious, that I lost interest in what happened to them and gave up on the book about three fourths of the way through.

I was interested in the concept of incest brought up in the very beginning. I never thought of it, but the close proximity of family members in those days, often sharing rooms and beds, could have easily have led to incestual relationships. I'm sure this is covered in sexual histories, I just haven't read any.

I was also fascinated in the beginning about the detailed descriptions of bee-keeping, one of the endeavors Hitler's dad takes on, but then it just got to be too much. Since I was listening, I couldn't flip past the pages on this.

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