Overview:
Mailer's "non-fiction novel" of Lee Harvey Oswald is stunning, not just for the new information he has uncovered about Oswald's life in Russia between 1959 and 1961, but because Mailer has ordered this information to provide true insight into Oswald's psyche. At nineteen and just out of the Marines when he flew to Moscow, Oswald intended to apply for Soviet citizenship, believing that Marxism was "purer" than capitalism. Remaining in the USSR for two and a half years, he married Marina and fathered a child before becoming disillusioned with his poverty and deciding to return to the US.
Mailer here explores not only the mysteries surrounding the murder of JFK but those involving the personality of the alleged assassin, Oswald. Employing the same technique that was so successful in The Executioner's Song (1979), Mailer arranges a vivid mosaic of hundreds of moments in his subject's life, recalled by scores of people and interspersed with extracts from his diary and from various official documents. In doing so, he gives us the daily textures of Oswald's life as vividly as he did that of Gary Gilmore. This is an impressive artistic achievement that offers irresistible, hypnotic reading. A substantial contribution to Kennedy assassination literature, it is, like Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song, an essential book for comprehending American life in the second half of the 20th century.
Presenting all the information available to him, Mailer maintains a balanced point of view. Though he mentions contacts Oswald made with the FBI, his attempt to go to Cuba, Mafia attempts to kill Castro, and Oswald's strange connection with Baron George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian emigre with some CIA ties, he draws no conclusions due to lack of evidence, leaving those to the reader. This fine novel organizes mountains of raw material, some of it new, to provide glimpses of who Oswald was and what may have motivated him.
"MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING."
--The New York Times Book Review
"MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination through the flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. But neither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literary imagination that Mailer here supplies in great force. . . . Oswald's Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy's death but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one that remains replete with miscomprehensions, unravelled threads and lack of resolution: All of which makes Oswald's Tale more true-to-life than any fact-driven treatise could hope to be. . . . Vintage Mailer."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"FASCINATING . . . A MASTER STORYTELLER . . . Mailer gives us our clearest, deepest view of Oswald yet. . . . Inside three pages you are utterly absorbed."
--Detroit Free Press
"MAILER AT HIS BEST . . . LIVELY AND CONVINCING . . . EXTREMELY
LUCID . . . Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . He has found a way to make the dry bones of KGB tapes and his own interviews stand up and perform. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection."
--Robert Stone
"THIS IS A NARRATIVE OF TREMENDOUS ENERGY AND PANACHE; THE AUTHOR AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM."
--Christopher Hitchens
"Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn't one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot's Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity."
--Martin Amis
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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