The Castle in the Forest, by Norman Mailer
Random House, 2007.
Octogenarian author Norman Mailer has crafted a reputation as a literary risk-taker while tackling such dynamic protagonists as Marilyn Monroe and Jesus, among others. In this new novel—his first in a decade—he takes on his greatest challenge yet and explores the world’s most enigmatic and terrifying personality: Adolf Hitler. A Satanic SS agent narrates Hitler’s childhood. While some readers might be bothered by how Mailer’s Freudian perspective hints at explanations for Hitler’s evil, others will be thrilled by his willingness to explore existential subjects without regard for taboos.
House of Meetings,
by Martin Amis.
Knopf, 2007.
Back in Siberia after decades of American exile, it is not memories of the gulag that Amis’s narrator chases with each vodka shot. Instead, he remains obsessed with a long-ago love triangle in which he, his brother, and vixen Zoya were entangled. The triangle was never equilateral: Zoya rejected his advances before marrying his brother Lev. In the deadening rhythm of the gulag, the narrator becomes consumed with jealousy and hate towards the two, even as he feigns nonchalance after Lev joins him at the camp. At the end of his life, he writes a letter—this novel—to his American daughter explaining this lifelong conflict with his brother, and using it as a lens on challenges at the heart of the Russian nation.
