The Deer Park: A Novel
Written by Norman Mailer
Narrated by John Buffalo Mailer
3/5
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About this audiobook
Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want—and how far they are willing to go to get it. As Mailer traces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtation with success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portrait of America's machinery of desire.
Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer (1923-2007) ha sido uno de los mayores escritores norteamericanos contemporáneos, así como una figura central en el panorama cultural: novelista, periodista, director de cine, activista político, aspirante a alcalde de Nueva York y enfant terrible todoterreno. Su primera novela, Los desnudos y los muertos, sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que lo catapultó a la fama, ha sido publicada por Anagrama, donde también han aparecido Los ejércitos de la noche (Premio Pulitzer y National Book Award), La Canción del Verdugo (Premio Pulitzer), Oswald. Un misterio americano, Los tipos duros no bailan, El parque de los ciervos, El Evangelio según el Hijo, El fantasma de Harlot, ¿Por qué estamos en guerra?, América y El castillo en el bosque.
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Reviews for The Deer Park
74 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Recurring existential crises of thoroughly unlikeable people— not worth the effort.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"I went to Palm Springs, and I didn't much care for it." You could, I guess, say that that's "The Deer Park" in a nutshell, but there's more to this book than mere moral censoriousness or lurid exposé. I haven't read much Mailer -- this is just the second book by him that I've ever read -- but the writing here is fantastic: crisp, forceful, masculine, and flowing. Reading it's like watching a really good pianist going after something stern and atonal with marvelously controlled intensity. Mailer's basic tool here is satire, and some film fans will, I suppose, have some fun trying to match the book's characters to their real-life analogues. Beyond that, though, I liked "The Deer Park" because there's so much about people that Mailer seems to get right in it: it offers an exquisitely informed description of the egoism of actors, the self-defeating egotism of many who who try to create art, perhaps most frighteningly, the weird mix of sentimentality and greed that motivates so many of the truly powerful. There's also pimp, self-made philosopher, and dead-eyed madnman Marion Faye, a portrait of a thoroughly destructive personality that's enormously chilling and, in its way, far ahead of its time. There is a lot of sex, indulgence, and general moral decay here: the novel's air of plush, seedy degeneracy is one of its attractions. You can see why a publisher of that time might have rejected it as obscene. But much of sexual content manages to be both bracingly frank enormously arousing, and I tend to think that writing about sex without seeming prurient or too self-serious is harder than it sounds. But the book is also an invigorating mix of literary and the unabashedly pulpy, beating writers like James Elroy and Robert Stone to this combination by at least twenty years. There's a recurrent religious analogy here that I think Mailer might take too far, and it is, I think, the only moment in which the book slips a little. Also, I found that the book, for all the scandal it contains, perhaps a bit too long and a bit too slowly paced, though that may simply be a reflection of its louche desert setting. I don't think that "The Deer Park" is one of Mailer's better-regarded books, but perhaps it's due for a revival. Few pieces of real-deal literature I've ever read sizzle so tantalizingly while going so deep.