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New York (dpa) - Norman Mailer, America's grand old man of letters, is set to release a fictional biography of Hitler which blames a family history of homosexuality, incest and promiscuity for creating the reviled dictator.
The Castle in the Forest, Mailer's 36th novel, focuses on the formative years of Hitler's life and uses a surrogate of the devil as a narrator. The book, which hits stores Tuesday, tells how Satan identified Hitler early on as a promising candidate and began manipulating him through dreams and meetings with people who reinforced his view that he alone understood the true nature of the world.
Mailer, 84, spent two years researching his subject but declines to say which parts of the book are fact-based and which are figments of his imagination.
In an interview with USA Today, he revealed that only one major character is made up - a beekeeper befriended by the schoolboy who explains how bees willingly sacrifice themselves for the good of the hive.
Mailer also revealed that he had wanted to write the novel for 50 years, before deciding "it was getting late in the day. I better get started."
Mailer starts the story several generations before young Adolf arrives in 1889 - the product of generations of incest. His own mother is actually his father's daughter. Called Adi by his doting mother, Hitler is often beaten by his lascivious father, setting him up as a psychiatric basket case.
The book has been met with both good and bad reviews, with critics praising his audacity and linguistic verve, but voicing disappointment over his choice of narrator and his alleged failure to shed any valuable new light on the root causes of Hitler's evil nature.
"The new book is lascivious, grandiose, cosmically critical... and cantankerous, filled with grandstanding pronouncements on the nature of evil," said Janet Maslin in The New York Times.
"The Castle in the Forest is a baffling, meandering, self-indulgent curio of a book," noted William Boyd in The Washington Post. "At moments brilliantly insightful and fascinating but more often prompting jaw-dropping incredulity."
"Who needs another book on Hitler?" asks critic Carlin Romano in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Through 900-page biographies, multivolume histories, pinpoint studies of everyone who ever crossed his path the world learned what it needed to know. Hitler is history's most overanalyzed psychopath."
Copyright 2007 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
