Review Picks

The Castle in the Forest

The Castle in the Forest cover
  • Author: Norman Mailer
  • Pages: 496
  • Price: $27.95
  • Publication Date: 2007-01-23
  • Publisher: Random House
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Adam Mars-Jones is not too impressed with Norman Mailer's first novel in a decade or so. In a review at The Guardian he says

The book is highly impressive for long stretches, but its flaws are perverse and even preposterous. It dies the death of a thousand cuts from self-inflicted wounds to intelligibility, but the punctures are all in the insistent, maddeningly silly cosmological framework.

(...)

There has never been a shortage of embittered fantasists, after all. The cautionary part of the story is the one that Mailer doesn't tell, the process whereby one such figure managed to impose himself on a society supersaturated with grievance and rancour.

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