Rating: 
Summary: Eye & Love & Death: all joined and disjointed here
Review: Early on in this interminable narrative, the three items of my subject line are referred to as unified. Mailer does labor mightily to bring this monsterful novel forth as a masterful tale. In the opening pages, describing death and pain, in the set-piece battle with the Hittites, in his description of being within the bowels of a tomb, in other descriptions of being within another's bowels--here, he succeeds. Like it or not, the excremental theme manages to connect the mud, the fecundity, the slime, the stink with carnal and practical and spiritual knowledge through power. I wonder if Foucault read this before he died?
What's disappointing, then, are the stagnant patches you must slog, or more likely skim, to get to the energized portions. Nearly 650 pages, and probably no more than 150 of them reward your effort. The characters of the little queens Honey Ball and Heqat, big queen Nefertiti, the main pharoahs, and the Hittite princess do manage to leap off the page. But you miss others that needed to be drawn more distinguishably--such as the wife of the Hebrew that the protagonist marries for fourteen or so years--this whole "lost weekend" episode could have been much better written. This whole lacuna in the story sags, as if Mailer had to have the narrator pass a few years in exile in order for the rest of Egypt to move forward to catch up with him.
As a result, the bracing plunge Mailer does give you into the mentality of an entirely alien way of faith, cosmology, and ethos manages to immerse you for long periods, only to be irritable when, as in the final stretch of the book, the care taken in parts falls apart and the story lumbers to an indifferently conveyed conclusion. As the pages go on, the narrative design of the book weakens, and the whole shift from one life to another seems to be--as in many time-travel stories--wobblier and less convincing. The ability of characters to drift in and out of each other's consciousness is an excellent device, yet it too is applied almost at random rather than with care.
I suppose the hours I spent with this book entertained me, but the investment of time paid off with less consistent rewards than the decade Mailer spent upon its construction would lead you to believe.
Rating:
Summary: Lewd, Disgusting but at times Enlightening & Powerful
Review: Full of characters who eat the excrement, flesh or [body parts] of a variety of animals in order to gain the wisdom and strength that they offer, Ancient Evenings journeys a path into a world of Ancient Egypt that I have never known. Nor frankly, for that matter, care to. Yet, Mailer's portrait of Rameses II, Usermare as he is known is this work, is incredible. Divine and human, Horus and Set are woven so well into the fabric of of this pharoah's character that his struggle to maintain harmony between these two opposing forces alone is worth wading through the rest of the book. My faith in Ancient Egypt as a whole and its actual traditions is restored by Mailer, however, by the conclusion of this work but not before I have been thoroughly disgusted by a variety of acts descibed by the protagonist Menehetet.
Rating: 
Summary: my favourite book
Review: I have read many mailer books and this is so good that I have read it three times and I am sure will read it many more times.
the imagination and story telling takes you to where the story takes.fantastic.I am going to get a hardback edition to go with my paperback as it is so special.
Rating: 
Summary: worst thing mailer ever wrote
Review: I have read this book over and over again. Every time I read it, something new pops up! This story(s) are beautifully put together and the entire thing is fabtastic! I would only recommend this book to adult readers, alot of the content is
Very graphic!
Rating:
Summary: Wasn't sure at first...
Review: I picked this book up used and had trouble to start with - the first 25 pages or so were the equivalent of wading through mud. After reading the reviews here I decided I'd plow through the rest of it or die trying. Fortunately, the writing evened out and became quite casual reading.It's a weird book to say the least and not like anything I've read (mostly classics, sci-fi and scientific) however it was thoroughly fascinating at the same time. It didn't matter what was going on in the story: the writing was powerful, the thoughts and images of the story clearly conveyed in writing. Very few books can put a picture in your head like this one can. While the sexual exploits were certainly entertaining (and quite humorous at times) they - like everything in the book - happened for a reason, illustrating the power struggles and state of the mind quite lucidly as the characters interacted with each other. This book isn't for everyone, but those able to read it cover to cover will think about the book and characters long after finishing it - the mark of any good book as far as I'm concerned.
Rating:
Summary: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
Review: I read this the first week it came out, long ago, and thought it the Great American Novel, despite its being set in Egypt. Why so grand an opinion? Because the writing, especially the set-pieces about mummification and a trip up the Nile, as well as others, were better written than any passages of equal length by any American author I'd ever read. RAINTREE COUNTY sets out to be the Great Amrican Novel but, as much as I enjoyed it when I was twenty, its lyricism falls short of Mailer's. The trip up the Nile is equaled only by Twain's Mississippi, Melville's Three-Day Chase at the end of MOBY DICK, and Hemingway's description of the deep waters Santiago fishes in in THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. I found Mailer's characters, even the walkons, more well-rounded and weighted than any by the whole pantheon of classic American writers. Melville, Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bellow, Updike, none of them has created Tolstoyan characters with feet as fully plantd on the page as Mailer's Egyptians. Nor has Mailer ever again matched the exquisite bath of light in which he washes these pages.
Rating:
Summary: Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer
Review: Norman Mailer, you say. But this is not what one would expect from Mr. Mailer. This is one novel, 2 novellas and a myth in one book about Ancient Egypt. The first part is a surreal scene which introduces us to the Egyptian concept of 'soul'. In the Judeo-Christian world view we have 'a' soul: the Egyptians had many, including the ba and ka to name two. The next is a wonderful retelling of the Osiris myth. The middle half of this large book is the story of Ramesses the Great's military expedition against the Hittites told by his charioteer. (This may be the section of the book most identified as 'Mailer'.) The last part is a dreamy view of life among the royals of ancient Egypt. A great read.
Rating: 
Summary: Masterful, Kaleidescopic rendering of Ancient Egypt
Review: Publishers Weekly was quoted regarding Mailer's THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON: "...[it's] penetration into Jesus's human heart rivals Dostoyevsky for depth and insight. Its recreation of the world through which Jesus walked is as real as blood. Ultimately, Mailer convinces, more than any writer before him, that for Jesus the man it could have been just like this; and that is, in itself, some sort of literary miracle."I am barely through half of this eight hundred odd page masterwork. Yet I am already amazed by Mailer's ability to penetrate the human heart of the civilization of the spiritual, highly advanced, mysterious Ancient Egypt with ANCIENT EVENINGS. Mailer seeminngly captures Egypt during a period that could be easily considered antithetically decadent to its many periods of great glory like the First Dynasty's uniting of the "The Two Lands," the Pyramid Age, the 12th Dynasty or the famous 18th, with Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and King Tut. Or, heartbreakingly enough for romantic Egyptophiles like myself, he could be capturing how everyday Egypt, underneath the pomp and circumstance of the persepective of an Egyptologist or the Kingly/Pharonic court ritual (much like Rome millenia later) actually was. Mailer has always been accused of personalizing himself too much in his work, and the evidence of twentieth century left-of-center White American bohemian life and culture, as well as its self-projected/narcississtic perspective on ancient Egyptian culture, does at times bleed through. African people South of Egypt are referred to in the novel as Negroes or Blacks. (Ancient Egyptian people, Pharaohs and rulers--those that weren't actually fully Black themselves--saw much greater differences amongst peoples regarding religions, kingdoms/class, language and geography than the modern world has taught us to believe about the myth of race and skin color. Such distinctions regarding non-Nilotic or non-North African African peoples [as the Egyptians were North African peoples whose language was in a family of languages shared by many peoples in a thousand mile radius], let alone quasi-contemptuous ruminations on them [patricularly considering the ancient Ethiopian, Dogon or Sudanese] would not have been made then as Mailer makes them when he wrote this, he being a product of pre-integrationist America). The conversations about that strange tribe known as the Hebrews are equally reflective of Biblical story and cultural influence as opposed to ancient Egyptian. (And of course, as the Torah/Old Testament was written many centuries after ANCIENT EVENING's story takes place, the Egyptian take on the Hebrews would be either far less interesting and mythologically significant to them, or interesting to the Pharoahs and religious leaders in a way that would change our entire concept of Western culture if it were revealed.) Most of all though, even for a left of center, non-homophobic artist like myself who knows the value of sexual freedom in artistic expression, the rampant and graphic scenes of homosexual dalliances and rapes are just a wee bit much for me (!). Just the same, Mailer's ability to weave the complexity of emotions, personalities, issues, struggles, strange powers, human potentialities and overall mysticism of the civilization and its people into a treatise on its understanding of the human spirit and the singular mystery of one continuously suspense-weaving plot, is already captivating me in magical ways. After working for years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Egyptian Art in New York, my enjoyment of reading this novel, which may have been a closet favorite of many of my curator friends, is greatly enhanced. I highly recommend this for anyone who likes Mailer, ancient Egyptian art and civilization, and a fascinating mystery. Pick it up, and even when it gets confusing to you, you won't be able to put it down.
Rating:
Summary: dire.. no really
Review: Self indulgent garbage from the pen of the once (it seemed to me anyway) infallible Mailer. What the hell was he thinking? I find it hard to believe that this mess came from the mind of the same man that wrote The Naked And The Dead. Ok, at some points the narrative can be readable, even enjoyable; a few protagonists certainly succeed in stimulating the reader at a few points; but by and large this is a rambling piece of piss. If you enjoyed this then I envy you because you are certainly easily amused, more than I can say.
Too often this book relies on nothing more than cheap shock value to engage the reader, artless descriptions of intercourse/ copulation which probably means heaven on earth for some panting voyeurs out there but sadly left me unmoved. Some might say I'm being a bit too scathing but I'm only voicing my opinion and I honestly think this book should be burned.
Rating:
Summary: Moonlight tonight
Review: That's what this book is about. Yes. It is VERY graphic, but the theme of this is about life (and death) then. One of the few [non]-fiction books I ever read. Made me want to read more of NM's stuff.
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