War for real | The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition

Worth every penny | The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition | Norman Mailer

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	• The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition Norman Mailer Picador, 2000 - 736 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Helprin meets Hemingway, But Better [51][80]

At 25, Mailer's insightful yarn about a World War II battleground shows how precocious and mature his writing skills were at that young age. After having personally lived two years in that same war, maybe Mailer - like many of the characters in the book - arrived as a boy and left as a man. But, unlike his characters, we know he was extremely literate and given a gift to write.

In college, Mailer claims to have written a lot - over 250,000 words. And, all before the age of computers, easy editing, and electric typewriters. This book, approximately 210,000 words, was amazingly completed with ribbons, manual returns and hand corrections in a period of 15 months.

Painstaking detail to the accounts of the 10-person unit enables the reader to feel the anguish and boredom often entailed among enlisted men. We enter their torpid minds sodden by the Japanese rains and febrile from the metallic heat, and learn why these drones constantly reject the authority of the commissioned as well noncommissioned officers who outrank them. The dichotomy existing in the military ranks is obvious. But, everyone puts one pant leg on at a time, we're all flesh and blood, we all are nothing special in the larger realm, or as one character (Red) says, "There damn sure ain't nothing special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he's dead."

In addition,behind closed doors, we witness the private life of the general overseeing all of them. His self hatred swells so greatly that he actually seeks defilade in war from his oppressive wife and home life.

Contrasted to the extremely thorough prose about the few weeks on the Japanese island, Mailer gives each main character a brief 9-12 page "life's story" - but not as a rendition, but instead laid out as a weave of few life-changing events, or discussions or both. These mini-biographies are all amazingly detailed in such cleverly simple delivery - very similar to Hemingway's best.

But, the greatest aspect of his book is the creation of the main characters' dialogue. Unlike other great writers, whose dialogue uses spellings and juxtaposed grammar to catch the accent and flavor of the region's "patois", Mailer has a vast number of accents to work from and deliver. Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, prep school, Chicago, Brooklyn, Mexican and others are all brilliantly depicted dialogues in this book. To be capable of creating such diverse accents is amazing. To deliver such amazing diverse dialogues at 25 is almost incomprehensible.

By the end, like any war story, we learn to love those who die and learn to hate some who live. Boys will be boys and some will never "do the right thing." And, sometimes it is the "good who die young." And, luckily, sometimes the good writers live, come home, rethink what horrors they just lived through, apply their God-given writing skills to such memories and deliver a book which will justly last for generations.

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War for real

The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

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Worth every penny

This was one of the best written books I have ever read. Although it is fiction it creates images of basic everyday life through a Grunts eyes.

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Awesome

The intensity of this book is astounding. It is a story of individual men being stripped of their individuality as they become united in a common task that eventually loses its purpose. The argument that this book is the definitive WWII novel has merit, particularly because it can be seen as an analogy to what the American people were experiencing during that time period: a compulsion to come together and rally around a cause that had, after some time, lost its urgency in the haze of blind, zealous patriotism. While many people would expect such an important novel to take place in the European Theater, its setting in the Pacific Theater lends an exotic novelty to the story, which allows the author to use horrific imagery that is exclusive to the alien nature of the jungle-choked island. The realism that defines this novel makes the story infinitely more tragic, particularly when the reader is exposed to the depressingly cyclical nature of the soldiers' lives. This is evident in all of the allusions to the past campaign in Motome, and the suggestion of further combat in the Philippines. The reader learns that there several kinds of people involved in the war, and the most evident dichotomy is between people who were made for combat (Croft) and those that relish the mundane, detail-laden periods between combat (Dalleson). Also, there is a strong distinction between people who can view war in the abstract (Cummings) and those that are powerless to block out the naked humanity that surrounds them (Every soldier in the platoon becomes the latter type at one point or another). Many other themes exist in this text, and I will leave it for future readers to discover them. Keep in mind that this book is not for the faint of heart- if the only favorites you have in your book section are classics you read in high school, this will not be an enjoyable read for you. However, if you are interested in WWII and wish to experience it via the printed word, this is an imaginative yet realistic novel whose harsh lessons will move you to a great deal of thought. Gone are the days when I considered WWII as mere historical fact.

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Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer.

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.

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