Overview

A work of meticulous research and breathtaking insight, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery asks the essential question about the Kennedy Assassination: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald Providing the first full account of his childhood, the years under KGB surveillance in Russia and the events from his return to the United States in 1961 to his death in Dallas. Norman Mailer brilliantly reconstructs the life of this ambitious, doom-laden young man, bringing to the task not only a sober respect for the facts but the power, as America's most distinguished novelist. To invest those facts with vibrant and haunting life.

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Reviews

'An epic tale' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Fascinating' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Anyone with curiosity will find a reason to read Origins Reconsidered: it is a superb account of the state of knowledge concerning the evolution of our species . . .Richard Leakey sees the wood and not just the trees' NEW SCIENTIST 'The most powerfully mysterious book to have emerged from America for many years.' THE TIMES 'The point of this book, though, is not who did it, but how Mailer has done it... sage and kingly, elegant and energetic, and perfectly getting the number of OLH-2938.' GUARDIAN 'OSWALD'S TALE is terrific: bristling with vitality and intelligence and wit, and organised with an inventive cunning that makes the reading utterly compelling.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'The meat of the book is the remarkable feat of imaginative sympathy which enables Mailer to engage with Oswald...' INDEPENDENT '... an insight that made the usual conspiracy theories look like so much cerebral Meccano.' Hugo Barnacle, BOOKS OF THE YEAR '... an extraordinary faction, a huge, sprawline, deeply intelligent epic that takes us nearer to the heart of the mystery surrounding the Kennedy assassination.' OBSERVER '... it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity.' THE SUNDAY TIMES '... his best piece of non-fiction since the first half of THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG.' Martin Amis, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Mailer's profound understanding of his country and its people generally... lifts the story of Lee Harvey Oswalk clear of the conspiracy crap mills and places it finally into American literature alongside William Manchester's classic DEATH OF A PRESIDENT.' EVENING STANDARD

Mailer subtly exercises his novelist's imagination and expends considerable journalistic shoe-leather probing our central cultural conundrum - Lee Harvey Oswald: Patsy or Lone Assassin? He starts in Minsk, where Oswald spent two and a half years after getting out of the Marines in 1959. Having interviewed what seems like half the population of that small Soviet city, Mailer gives us an Oswald slightly disaffected, by no means friendless, adept at jerking bureaucracy's chain. He takes a wife, they fight often. (The author's voice does not intervene in Minsk; later, Mailer interpolates sections of interpretation as to what happened and why.) Then the Marines: Oswald as overgrown playground butt, possibly passing some low-level secrets to somebody. On to Dallas. The Oswalds are looked upon as charity cases by the Russian emigre community. Oswald, frustrated, reads Mein Kampf and tries to assassinate right-wing general Edwin Walker. He fails. Slowly Mailer enters his subject's spiritual world, seeking the answer (obvious but impressively textured) of why Oswald - mama's boy, animal lover, wife-beater, half-assed autodidact, ideologue - might make an attempt on the president's life. Despite the lower middle class grisaille of his existence, Oswald was convinced, like Hitler, that he was destined for greatness. Hitler used his survival in the trenches of WW I as a Sign. Oswald decided that regicide would anoint him. Yet troublesome figures encircle him, including the superbly louche George de Mohrenschildt, with his connections to the CIA, and David Ferrie, the farcically hairless pedophile who was mobster Carlos Marcello's pilot. Mailer's careful and believable verdict: The odds are three out of four that Oswald was a lone gunman. Combining the tedious and the sublime in quintessential Mailer fashion, the text reconstructs Oswald the cipher and pawn, replacing him with Oswald the ideological aspirant with an almost occult belief in his destiny. Judicious, painstaking, and imaginative, this should be a central book in a growing and undependable canon. (Kirkus Reviews)

It is easy to see why Mailer wanted to write the biography of the man who assassinated President Kennedy - and easy to see how the book grew to such an inordinate length. With unprecedented access to KGB files, interviews with almost everyone who ever knew Oswald (including many Russians who met him, if only casually, while he worked in Russia), it must have seemed impossible to write a shorter book. Mailer's command of the language is as remarkable as ever, but it has to be said that he fails to make Oswald particularly interesting as a man and throws little light on possible motives for the killing of the President - though maybe to ask for that is to ask for the impossible. In the end, however, here is all and possibly more than all that is known about Oswald, and everyone interested in the events of 22 November 1963 will want to read it. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

After graduating from Harvard Norman Mailer served in the South Pacific during World War II. He published his first book in 1948 and won the Pulitzer Price twice for THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT and THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG.

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