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Harlot's Ghost

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The author spends little time in filtering to what he really needed to say, and as a result, the book is at least twice as big as it should have been. The writing, however, Mailer’s use of the language, which is as important to me as texture in food, is superb. Harlot's Ghost is impressive, not so much because of Mailer's apparently thorough analysis of the CIA, but rather because of Kittredge, Mailer's most believable female character to date. It took a while as I frequently tired of his literary method of often telling the story through the exchange of letters between the two main characters.

I finished Harlot’s Ghost despite it being the most Normal Mailer-ish thing Norman Mailer could ever have pulled from his fevered mind. Mailer died while writing book two of the planned Harlot's Ghost trilogy but the fact that it's an unfinished masterpiece doesn't stop it being a masterpiece. It is the only true fjord on the Atlantic coast of North America, yet it is but a part of our rock-hewn splendor.

I remember the scene where the protagonist and Kittredge walk out of a Lenny Bruce show, offended at his jokes. We start at the end, which in this case is 1983, and Harry is driving back from a tryst with his mistress.

Such studies may have lacked the zest of tradecraft, but they managed to convince me that any mischief we could work on our evil opponent left us clearly on the right side. The ghosts of these Indians may no longer pass through our woods, but something of their old sorrows and pleasures joins the air. We're rich boys, after all, with no background, and we're playing around the world with the hearts of the poor. Ensconced in Moscow's Hotel Metropole, Harry rereads "The Game" on microfilm; this account constitutes the bulk of "Harlot's Ghost.The present reader found it a spellbinding read; a masterful, richly ironic dramatization of America’s National Security State, through the eyes of its most devoted foot soldiers. While islands, according to my wife, are supposed to be more acceptable to invisible spirits than to such peculiarly apparent manifests as ghosts, I think we break the rule. They are apricot, then lavender, and pale green, yet in late afternoon they become purple over the whole, a dark royal violet is the color of the twilight shore seen from the sea.

Warum brennt das Haus dieses eher zweitrangigen CIA-Offiziers, verschwindet seine Frau, flieht er in panischem Schrecken nach Moskau, in die Höhle des Löwen? The Berlin and Montevideo sections appear meaningless until the Kennedy and other big characters arrive post the halfway mark and the book takes on the Cuban chapters. I was deeply fraught after reading about Operation Mongoose (as well as other subversive operations) in all its explication. A corporate executive from Philadelphia, Bingham Baker, and his family now inhabit the house and seem to thrive on the ghost—at least, all the Bakers look pink-cheeked in church. Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost laboriously restages the Cold War’s early years through the Central Intelligence Agency.Yet Mailer is less interested in the nuts and bolts of espionage, although there’s an ample amount of that, than how the labyrinth of intelligence-gathering warps its operatives. This is true neither to tenors nor to the tone of Allen Dulles -- nor, I should think, to the tenor of C. Once, when I was a boy (for I studied the names of wildflowers then) I found the white-vein orchid in some swampy woods; it was greenish-white, and lovely, and as rare as the moon entering eclipse. This is a psychological study of the necessary duality of agents, teased from the central soul of the duality of humankind.

So, let’s begin with the sheer stupidity of telling such a massive, detailed, discursive tale by structuring it as a series of letters between two navel-gazing narcissists. Harlot promptly dialed that office, and as he watched, the man separated himself from the embrace long enough to pick up his phone. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The very beginning of the book starts with Harry being told by a friend that his mentor Hugh Montague (a top level CIA officer) has either been assassinated or committed suicide on his boat. What this novel has going for it is this: it is a perfectly scaled model of the workings of the American government.That said, I don't remember much of it except for the mundane details of a spy's life, a life affair and talk of buggering. plots, from "Oedipus Rex" to that remarkable Elio Petri film, "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. If you've never read Mailer, then I would start with The Naked and the Dead but if I liked that I would read Harlot's Ghost next. A book with ambitions this large is bound to fail, and that it succeeds as much as it does is a tribute to Mailer's talents.

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