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Title:The Naked and the Dead
Author:Norman Mailer
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:50th Anniversary Edition
Pages:Pages: 721 pages
Published:August 28th 2000 by Picador (first published 1948)
Categories:Fiction. Classics. War. Historical. Historical Fiction. Literature
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The Naked and the Dead Paperback | Pages: 721 pages
Rating: 3.94 | 22595 Users | 790 Reviews

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Us readers have no homes, like unnoticed birds we perch anywhere, like the most disturbed stalkers we go through anybody’s underwear drawer, like vicious tax-gatherers we audit everyone, the writers especially, their creatures the characters very particularly, and hanging between all three of us, the book. It sits there in its cover. We ticket, we note, we award, with our eyes, brains and stars. We scribble in the margins to the outrage of future readers – well, I do, maybe you do not do that. (I never mind if someone has previously done that.)

So I have looked out of Humbert Humbert’s paedophiliac eyes, I overheard the good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ, I declined and fell with Paul Pennyfeather and I closely observed Molly Bloom in her bed for at least three hours, she didn’t notice a thing. It was like I wasn’t there. With Jeanette Winterson I too grew up in a crazy Christian cult, and like others before me I could not stop Merricat Blackwood from her pyromania whatever I did. Well, you could all say similar things. Our acceptance of the thousand varieties of human beingness is almost limitless. We are promiscuity itself.

The Naked and the Dead is not really about World War Two, or about war in general, it’s about looking through the eyes of men, a whole bunch of them, sleeping with them, eating with them, drinking, pissing and fighting with them. In this novel, the thing to have is a penis. The testosterone floweth through this novel as doth the Ganges through India. And… I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to go through all this painful stuff with a bunch of assorted blokes constantly eating, farting, sleeping, waking, yakking, being blown up or not, writing letters, bragging, playing poker, theorising banally about women and on. And on.

Because there are a thousand characters, Mailer provides each with a description round the time they are introduced. Such as:

He was a little over medium height, well fleshed, with a rather handsome sun-tanned face and graying hair. His expression when he smiled was very close to the ruddy, complacent and hard appearance of any number of American senators and businessmen, but the tough good-guy aura never quite remained. There was a certain vacancy in his face, like the vacancy of actors who play American congressmen.

Well, after several descriptions like this everything blurs together and you realise why Catch-22 works so well because in that war novel everyone is a cartoon, no painful attempt at ultra-realistic detail at all, so Milo Minderbinder, Major Major, Colonel Korn and the rest remain intact in the memory years later.

But really, me trying to read N&D was doomed to failure. It could have been a good one, I guess, you never know until you try, heck I’ve liked some funny things in my time. But the signs were not good :

1) I am ferociously biased against novels written by 24 year olds and any novels written by anyone under 30. (Writing novels is like the opposite of pop music). Evelyn Waugh has squeaked by (Decline and Fall) and I guess you have to give Mary Shelley the nod too, then there’s Dickens of course….ok, ok, MOSTLY I don’t think people under 30 can write a good novel. Norman Mailer is no Mary Shelley, and he would have been the first to admit that.

2) I hate war stories – Hamburger Hill, Platoon, From Here to Eternity, I avoid them all. I did watch Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line and like, that’s enough.

3) I thought I should read this because I was reading Norman Mailer’s biography which is VERY ENTERTAINING but I just always wanted to be finding out what happened to NORMAN next not the boys in the jungles of Anopopei.

I can tell this is really a heck of an accomplishment, he commands his material fearlessly, ther’s no holding back, he’s a right know-it-all, and somebody needed to do a big honest novel about men in WW2 which could be set beside the big thumpers from WW1 (there won’t be any great novels coming out of WW3).

So, for me this was a 2 star experience from a 4 star novel, abandoned a little shamefacedly but with relief.


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Original Title: The Naked and the Dead
ISBN: 0312265050 (ISBN13: 9780312265052)
Edition Language: English
Characters: Gallagher, Croft, Hearn, General Cummings
Setting: South Pacific Anopopei


Rating Out Of Books The Naked and the Dead
Ratings: 3.94 From 22595 Users | 790 Reviews

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Us readers have no homes, like unnoticed birds we perch anywhere, like the most disturbed stalkers we go through anybodys underwear drawer, like vicious tax-gatherers we audit everyone, the writers especially, their creatures the characters very particularly, and hanging between all three of us, the book. It sits there in its cover. We ticket, we note, we award, with our eyes, brains and stars. We scribble in the margins to the outrage of future readers well, I do, maybe you do not do that. (I



As a young woman I swore I would never read anything by that bastard Norman Mailer. I'd read "The Executioner's Song" and thought it okay but I despised Mailer as if from a personal feminist vendetta. In fact, I still do. BUT this book knocked my socks off. I loved it. So much for prejudice.

Is it Mailer's second hand re-telling of horrors of war makes him give a detachment to his characters? Or is it his own inexperience makes it a better war novel as a whole? Most novels based on war have a tendency to evoke sympathy, glamorize apathy or expect empathy. Normal Mailer's The Naked and the Dead does none of that. Its representation of bunch of people stuck in a war they don't understand, afraid of death hovering in every shadow. The brutal prose Mailer executes removes all possible

Thoughts: gawdawful Story recap: men on boats, men get off boats and one man dies, a few Japanese soldiers are killed, an American soldier dies, a Japanese soldier dies, men carry a wounded man back, soldiers try to climb a mountain.Between all this men talk and FEEL.Better title than Naked and the Dead would beThe Househusbands of the South Pacific.Mailers point is nihilism.Only good thing is that Ive read other Mailer works that were very good. If I had read this first I would NEVER have read

Picked up towards the end, but still wasn't my cup of tea...I wonder, if it would have been better to read this in my mother tongue...

Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead- Norman Mailer, The Naked and the DeadNorman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is War and Peace as written by Larry David. It has all the Tolstoyean hallmarks: dozens of main characters; an ever-shifting