Advertisements for Myself

Rating:
Summary: Cannibals & Christians
Review: Advertisements For Myself: One needs to sit at the Bar at The Crown & Cork Hotel in Provincetown, MA, close by the neon lobster pot signs illuminating gleaming rain-streaked alleyways -
and order a Jameson against the cold - to appreciate Mailer.
Much as Raymond Chandler.

Like Cannibals & Christians, it is Mailer's best work; heavy-drinking political journalism with a sharp weather-eye for cynical abuse of cultural icons and religion in manipulation of protokaryotic cellular life. I'm sure Mr Mailer will turn that sharp gaze next on Afghanistan. ( If he rebounds from 1300 pp of Harlot's Ghost ).

We're hopeful that his account of Afghanistan will evoke the battle of Bosworth Field in England in 1485. And Richard IIIs abandonnment by Northumberland ; the treachery of Stanleys' shift to Henry. The battlefield, gives Shakespeare verse, ``A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse''; In terms of Mailer's outreach to protokaryotic stem cells;It is relaxing to think we spent 2 billion years after the oceans formed just relaxing. Then nuclei & mitochondria formed in cells. Then 2 more billion years passed and Michael Crichton was born and later entered Andover after the dinosaurs suffered mass extinction.
Later Rap music was introduced.
( In between there was the explosive Cambrian efflourescence of life experiments, many of them jelly-like, looking like a science experiment gone horribly awry; or like your fish tank when you come back from vacation ).
Mr Mailer gets at metaphors for this process, later, in Ancient Evenings.
As a former boxer, I can caution Mr Mailer that whiskey, boxing & writing are a volatile and fecund mixture, best left to young Turks.


Rating:
Summary: Mailer promised so much more than he ever delivered
Review: All during the 1960s, when authors still appeared on The Tonight Show, The Dick Cavett Show, etc, the two authors who had the most exposure and most proclaimed their "genius" were Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Both fizzled miserably. Their dwindling fame will be filed under "Celebrity" rather than "Literature." Mailer is the better of the two, but he has not worn well.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic, grotesque, extraordinary book.
Review: Originally appearing in 1959, "Advertisements for Myself" remains one of the most unusual books ever published by a novelist. Containing stories, essays, reviews, interviews, novel excerpts and poems, all with detailed, italicized annotations courtesy of the author, this book displays a massive, raging talent assessing itself and the world around it. It is sometimes poignant, sometimes maddening, but never less than compelling. I love this book.

Today, Mailer's reputation is rather up in the air. To me, his career is an example of an artist constantly pushing himself, writing with breathtaking ambition even if it exceeded his skill. There has never been another writer like Norman Mailer, and it is touching to read here of his desire to write a novel on the level of Dostoyevsky, Mann and Tolstoy, and to read his pithy, sometimes hilarious assessments of his contemporaries. His commentary on the ups and downs of his career and his disgust and sadness about the decline of American literature are illuminating, but his self-aggrandizement and egocentricity are often difficult to stomach. However, one has to stand in awe at the monument of his talent and his passion.

Reading this book today, one has to ask, "Did he fulfill his expectations?" I think so. "Harlot's Ghost," "Ancient Evenings," "The Executioner's Song" and numerous other works, both fiction and nonfiction, will endure, in my opinion. But I, for one, would like to know whatever happened to the self-promoted masterpiece of a novel he excerpts here. The small sections make for very stimulating reading.

All in all, "Advertisements for Myself" is a required text for everyone who loves great literature or aspires to write it for themselves.

Rating:
Summary: Mailer promised so much more than he ever delivered
Review: This book is filled with fiction, essays, and, literally, advertisements for Mailer. The ad he took out for "The Deer Park" is the classic of classics. There is a great work in here called "The Time of Her Time." Sergius O'Shaugnessey is the hero, and I got the idea he would appear again and again in Mailer's future fiction, but it never happened to my knowledge. This is a great book!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating book, nothing quite like it
Review: This was one of the strangest and most engaging fictional works I have ever read. An autobiographical narrative consisting of novel excerpts, social commentary, reviews and short stories. Brutally honest and at times hilarious, I find myself regularly rereading many parts of the book and I'm always stunned by ,above all else, Mailer's humor and the vivid and unforgettable stories and characterers that he creates.

One reviewer remarked that Mailer's reputation in somewhat up in the air. Certainly Over the years Mailer has suffered much harsh criticism, from charges that he is misogynist to claims that he never fulfilled his own potential.

Nonetheless, Ancient Evenings and this book are his best works and I'm sure they will survive the test of time.

Rating:
Summary: "Required reading for any aspiring novelist."
Review: Writing in the New York Times Book Review, James Shapiro, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, says, "The passage of time has dimmed the reputation of 'The Naked and the Dead,' but time has also cleared the way to a finer appreciation of what to my mind is one of the most daring works of the postwar years, 'Advertisements for Myself' (1959), required reading for any aspiring novelist." He goes on to say, parenthetically, "The sad fact that it is currently in print only because Harvard University Press picked up the lapsed rights says a lot about the state of contemporary trade publishing."