The Naked and the Dead

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, sad and very lonely
Review: Earlier this year I decided to improve the quality of the books I was reading - or, at least, to mix more "good" books in with the easy reading. The Naked and the Dead was the first of these - and what a good choice it was.

Norman Mailer writes with a clarity that is often missing from other good novelists. He develops very strong characters and focusses closely on the interactions between them and their environment. Don't expect an action-packed story: The tales here are the soldier's lives and the lack of action is part of war which seems to be very realistically reconstructed.

The story, for what it's worth, follows a band of recon soldiers on an island in the Pacific during World War II. The book opens with the initial assault on the Japanese-held island; it finishes with the quick and anti-climatic (deliberately so) mopping up of the last troups. In between we follow the soldiers' progress through the jungle, go with them on a desperate recon. mission, and learn about their lives through a series of personal flashbacks.

We also see a full range of characters - at all levels in the army - and see their private and semi-private battles with authority. Often the authority in question is an over-demanding or idiotic superior; just as often it is an insolant, stubborn inferior. It is this interplay between the ranks that makes this novel stand out.

The book seems long, but it really is a page turner up with the best of them. At the end of it, you'll be able to say you really enjoyed a work of great fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Best War Book ever
Review: I am reading this book, and I think it is a better novel than I thought it would be, I thought "oh, great more lies about World War 2." Until I read this. Most books show about a little blond private that never gets hurt, until he hears the bullet whizzing past his head then he dies. But this book was different; it tells the reader about what happened about some story that never happens. This is s non fiction book, if you're into war novels you should like this book the plot is very easy to understand, so I recommend this book to you, if you are into war novels.

Rating:
Summary: Origin of a Species
Review: I bought the book based on size and reputation. I read nothing from Mailer prior to this book, and I needed something to occupy several hours of travel in Europe. Over 800 pages of prose would do the trick.

I ended up reading the book in the hotel, four hours at a stretch. I was fascinated by it, particularly in seeing so many familiar literary devices originate with this novel. The backstories of the characters were excellent, and I found it to be a compact way of developing the characters and explaining their motivations.

What I particularly liked was the writing style, and the Lieutenant-General struggle was perhaps the real soul of the book. The self-awareness of each competitor, and the misconception of what each was trying to accomplish, was a microcosm of each struggle throughout the book. Every point of conflict was sharply defined through a misunderstanding, a lack of communication, a little misstep here or there, compounding to some surprising and gut wrenching conclusions.

Because the ending was frustrating to me, I found it completely believable and realistic. I can see someone stumbling into a victory; I can see our hero dying due to betrayal; and I can see the flawed, vaguely malignant leader emerge largely unscathed from the chaos.

...I can understand the reservations of some reviewers, but only in an abstract, "right to your opinion" sort of way. For me, this was a 4.5 on a 5-star scale. The only reservation was the self-censoring of certain words and phrases to pass editorial review, something I feel should not be an author's consideration when writing. I can forgive this weakness in a 25 year old Norman Mailer, however. He's certainly earned it.

Rating:
Summary: A classic, yet flawed
Review: Mailer's Naked and the Dead is the story of a group of soldiers on an island in the Pacific during world war II, trying to take control of the island. Rather than focus on the macro-elements of the campaign, Mailer gives us an almost cinematic treatment of this platoon of a dozen soldiers, showing us their fears and desires, their foibles and prejudices. With flashbacks (Time Machines) giving the context and past of each of the men, you start to understand them more as the book moves on. By the time the platoon sets out on a reconnaissance patrol, you are familiar with all the main characters.

But the book suffers from over-wordiness at times, especially since so much of it is description of the soldiers' movements and surroundings. The tension among the men could be tauter, and the book could be a hundred pages shorter. But Mailer's gut-punching style, using simple words and sentences, gives an earthy feel to this book, which certainly was more influential when it was released than it is now. It's still a must-read, though.

Rating:
Summary: Could've Been Worse
Review: Mailer's take on war, is just a weak "Three Soldiers" which was written by a much better writer: Dos Passos.
Pass on "The Naked and the Dead",
pick up the real deal: "Three Soldiers".

Rating:
Summary: Length justified by Depth and Verse
Review: The Naked and the Dead is as long and winding as the half-cut trails of Anopopei. The struggle of each character is monotonous, and Mailer insists that the reader understand this monotony through seemingly endless repetition. However, this repetition was the life he was trying to portray. Yes, the book is long, but it is good. I must admit that there were parts that I was tempted to do without, but the occasional poetic verse kept things alive.

Mailer was indeed a poet. Some of the metaphors and descriptions used seem to drop the reader into the trance-like state that so many soldiers must have felt in the presence of death. The remarkable precision of post-war thought blended with existentialist ideal make this book multi-faceted. A greek tragedy, a philisophical warning, The Naked in the Dead brings the horror of war to the reality of every individual.

Rated a 9 by virtue of its depth and poetic-like verse.
Rated a 9 by the unsettling realism that so many wish was only a story.

David Knape

Rating:
Summary: Mailer didn't get it right
Review: This book was strikingly similar to The Thin Red Line. The characters, the use of literary techniques, the settings and subsettings all similar. However, Mailer and Jones did not get it right. These books don't tell the true story of war. They certainly dipict physical side of war, the torn land and the carnage, but it is the personal side of war that they miss. In this book Mailer fails to capture the true essence of human nature. Because the fact is people at war depend on each other. Mailer and Jones display the rivalries among the men. Ofcourse, rivalries are common in the young men the write about. Men at war do not often get along together, you always have the jerks and the sadsack, but they bond far more than they compete. No fiction I have read regarding WWII has managed to capture this. The Naked and the Dead is just another example of the dry, monotonous, and even lousy world war fiction that has been written. I truthfully cannot explain all the great reviews on this book, it is very very average. You want to know what it was like, read Stephen Ambrose, Gerald Astor, or Eugene Sledge.

Rating:
Summary: Mailer didn't get it right
Review: This book was strikingly similar to The Thin Red Line. The characters, the use of literary techniques, the settings and subsettings all similar. However, Mailer and Jones did not get it right. These books don't tell the true story of war. They certainly dipict physical side of war, the torn land and the carnage, but it is the personal side of war that they miss. In this book Mailer fails to capture the true essence of human nature. Because the fact is people at war depend on each other. Mailer and Jones display the rivalries among the men. Ofcourse, rivalries are common in the young men the write about. Men at war do not often get along together, you always have the jerks and the sadsack, but they bond far more than they compete. No fiction I have read regarding WWII has managed to capture this. The Naked and the Dead is just another example of the dry, monotonous, and even lousy world war fiction that has been written. I truthfully cannot explain all the great reviews on this book, it is very very average. You want to know what it was like, read Stephen Ambrose, Gerald Astor, or Eugene Sledge.

Rating:
Summary: The first classic novel of WW II
Review: This is the novel that made Norman Mailer an overnight literary sensation, and was perhaps the first famous literary work dealing with events in WW II. Unlike some of the other great WW II classics like CATCH-22 and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, it was written immediately following the war.

From the comments I read from other reviewers, I seem to like this novel a bit less than others. While it is unquestionably a novel of great scope and seriousness, I found much of it to be stiff and somewhat dated. Many of the characters seemed to me to be stock characters, and almost all of the conversation struck me as stiff and artificial. I should add, however, that I have heard Mailer interviewed on several occasions, and interestingly I find his own conversational style to be somewhat stiff and artificial. So, it might be that the style in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD follows his own inner voice.

Nonetheless, even for a relative nonfan of the book, there is much to admire in this book. One scene describing a battle at night possessed a great deal of power. And while I found the conversations awkward, over the course of time you get a sense of the dynamics and personalities of the various platoon members. What especially surprised me about the book was how cynical and disillusioned the novel felt. It was, after all, published in 1948, and the flush and pride of victory already feels stale and faded. This is not the John Wayne in THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA.

One disconcerting aspect of the book was the extensive use of pseudo-profanity. Obviously, in 1948 Mailer or his editors either felt or knew that the novel would face censorship charges if the F-word were used. Instead, the word "fug" is substituted liberally throughout, and the effect for modern reader is jarring and unpleasant, almost as if the men were speaking a different dialect. It may have been one of the factors that made the prose seem somewhat artificial to me. After more than 50 years, it would be nice to see Mailer authorize a new edition with more explicit speech. This makes the novel sound more dated than it ought.

While I found this somewhat disappointing and less moving than I had anticipated, this is nonetheless well worth reading. From a literary standpoint it features one of the most full-blooded tales of combat in WW II and from a historical standpoint it was the first great English-language fictional account of the conflict. Either of those reasons would suffice to make this a worthy read.

Rating:
Summary: The best book about war, any war!
Review: While war is never a fun subject to read or write about, we owe it to ourselves to read as much about it as possible so we can never forget the terrors and the horrors, and the price those brave men and women pay by marching almost certainly to their deaths. There have been a lot of books about war, from Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage and just about every book Hemmingway ever wrote, but I think the crowning achievement of these war novels is probably Norman Mailer's book. Why? Read on.

Mailer is the first to show the grim unrelenting monotony of war in its entirety, and its length reflects that. There are few battle scenes in The Naked and the Dead, mostly just men sitting around with little to do but think about their lives and argue with each other. Mailer's turns of phrase are clear and concise, yet give the reader a clear pitcher of what is going on in the character's head. The Time Machine sections are the best way to show background of a person that I've ever read.

I've read elsewhere that the novel is actually a iconoclastic protrayal of a liberal vs. conservative argument between Hearn and Cummings but don't bother yourself with that. Just sit down someplace comfortable and open up the best war novel ever written