The Castle in the Forest: A Novel by Norman Mailer Reviewed by Ruth Franklin
The New Republic Online
"The reader strong-stomached enough to make it to the end of Norman Mailer's new novel, which comprises nearly five hundred of the most revolting pages in recent American fiction, will discover a refreshing oasis of reason. This oasis is a bibliography of more than a hundred assiduously chosen books, many of them mainstays of the scholarship and literature of Nazi Germany: Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Hitler; the works of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Joachim Fest, Ernst Nolte, and George Mosse; even Dr. Faustus. A note from Mailer solemnly informs us that certain titles, marked with an asterisk, 'did provide me...with a bounty of factual and chronological references that a novel in this form can never ignore'...." Read the entire New Republic Online review.