The Time of Our Time (Living Language Series) - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375754911 ISBN 13: 9780375754913

Publisher: Modern Library Inc, 2000

Synopsis

One of the twentieth century's greatest writers chronicles his career and his times through interrelated passages taken from his works

About this title

Review:

Compiling an anthology of one's own work can be a tricky business. Norman Mailer, of course, first committed this act of literary cannibalism back in 1959, when he assembled a brilliant collage of stories, journalism, essays, and poetry, Advertisements for Myself . Now, 50 years after the publication of his first novel, Gore Vidal's favourite sparring partner has put together another, more massive anthology, advertising not only himself but what we might call (paraphrasing Frost) his lover's quarrel with American life. "Over the course of years," Mailer writes in his foreword, "most of us compose in the privacy of our minds a social and cultural history of the years through which we have passed." True enough. But Mailer's history of the American Imperium has always been public-- extremely public--and in The Time of Our Time he attempts to get it all into a single book.

Surely this sense of himself as the republic's recording angel accounts for the structure of Mailer's anthology: rather than arranging the excerpts by date of composition, he groups them by the historical era they describe. His 1963 polemic about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for example, appears alongside his cloak-and-dagger reconstruction of the same event from Harlot's Ghost (1991). Fiction and fact lie cheek-by-jowl and eventually become impossible to tell apart. Here is the fulfilment of a project that Mailer began decades ago with such cunning hybrids as Armies of the Night. Yet this enormous volume shouldn't be read merely as a hand-tooled work of history. It is also the record of a phenomenal literary career, documenting Mailer's initial triumphs, his adrenaline-infused masterpieces of the late 1960s, hyperbolic stinkers like Marilyn and Ancient Evenings, and the astringent sorrow and awe of The Executioner's Song, which marked his return to form in 1979 after a long fallow period. Who but this loudmouthed, elegant, shrewd and invariably excessive author would claim that his time--that is, his accounting of it--is essentially our time? And who else could even begin to make such a claim stick? The list is short indeed.

Review:

He is a genuine original, working against the grain of most of his contemporaries (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

America's best writer (OBSERVER)

The book is like Mailer himself, a sprawling, raging talent, equally infuriating and captivating. (SCOTSMAN)

You reel at the energy, diversity and, yes, genuis displayed in this essential book. (INDEPENDENT)

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375754911
• ISBN 13: 9780375754913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1312