Somewhere in this book, Mailer (once again referring to himself in the third person) makes a rather interesting observation. He remarks that with the writing of each new book, he embarks on a journey of employing a new style to convey its story.

As a result, every single book he pens is entirely, utterly unique, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to anything he has accomplished before.

This perhaps explains why I find it so difficult to complete so many of his works.

It's as if he constantly challenges the reader with his ever-evolving and distinct writing styles, making it a bit of a struggle to keep up and fully engage with each new creation.

And yet, there is something undeniably captivating about his approach, as it keeps the literary landscape fresh and exciting, even if it means that some of his books remain unfinished in my reading pile.

The scruffy Ambassador Theatre in Washington, which is usually a place for psychedelic frolics, witnessed an unexpected scatological solo last week in support of the peace demonstrations (Mailer 1). This is the start of Norman Mailer's Magnum Opus, The Armies of the Night. It provides a complete explanation of what happened on the fateful afternoon of October 27th, 1967, the day when the most important anti-war event truly took place. This book is not only a prevalent account of the March on the Pentagon but also one of the most significant books in the "Faction" or New Journalism genre, which was created by Truman Capote in 1966 with his masterpiece, In Cold Blood.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, "History as a Novel", offers a new journalism or factual perspective of the events through the eyes of the narrator, Norman Mailer. The accounts of what actually happened at the March are real, including the arrest of the author himself and the attempt by some protesters to start an "evil" chant to lift the Pentagon off the ground. The main fiction here is the creation of the narrator and his influence on how the events are perceived. Many times, the narrator seems unclear about what is going on, like when he gets drunk at a party from Brandy. The second part, "Novel as a History", brings in other people's accounts of what they believe happened at the March of the Pentagon, from writers such as Margie Stamberg and Thorne Dreyer from the Washington Free Press. The second half of the book is a complete history of the events that occurred that day, but this time from the press and from the accounts of those who attended.

Norman Mailer was a writer and journalist born in 1923. He was credited, along with Truman Capote, for the creation of the literary genre New Journalism. From New Jersey, he attended Harvard University at the age of 16, studying Aeronautical engineering. Soon, he became interested in writing and published his first story in 1941, which won a contest. He was drafted into the army in 1943 and served until the end of WWII. The draft drastically changed his views on war, and he ultimately hated the idea. This influenced the writing of his first book, The Naked and the Dead. It was also the reason why, when Mitchell Goodman called him in 1967 about the March, he accepted to go. At the March, he and 650 other people were arrested and spent the night in jail. This experience led him to write The Armies of the Night.

This book has fascinated me with the many great adventures of the Yippies. The Yippies have always intrigued me, and their sub-culture is truly remarkable. Choosing a 150-pound hog as their presidential candidate is simply hilarious! The Yippies are a wonderful group of people. I have a passion for the counterculture and how they operated, and this book has provided me with more information about one of the biggest anti-war rallies that this group had. I have once again fallen in love with this subculture, which started when I heard my first Beatles album as a teenager. As I read, I continued to wish that I could have been there to witness what many people were fortunate enough to experience. Unfortunately, my generation is full of threats and violence, so why can't we go back to a time when peace rallies were settled by singing "Yellow Submarine"? This book has made me realize how much I wanted to be there to witness all of this, and it is probably a great resource for anyone who loves the counterculture movement or wants to learn more about anti-war rallies. The only complaint I have is that Norman is often redundant in what he says and is very slow to get started, but once he gets going, he will hook you until the end. Please read this book; it is a wonderful experience.

Mailer's ideological stance of self-identified "Left Conservatism" is truly admirable. It cuts through the haze and empty slogans of hippie nonsense, offering a clear-sighted assessment of the march on the Pentagon.

Even though his work contains clear insights that are often buried within digressions upon digressions, Mailer still struggles to fully focus on his greatest ideas. He seems to be constantly chasing after the elusive dragon of profundity, running wild in his attempts.

One might wonder why this work was considered worthy of a Pulitzer. Perhaps it was due to recency bias, or maybe it was because of its social conscience. The truth is, it could be a combination of both.

Regardless of the reason, Mailer's work remains an important piece of literature that offers a unique perspective on a significant moment in history. It forces us to question our own beliefs and assumptions, and to consider the complex issues that underlie social and political movements.

Classic, right?

Yes, indeed. This work holds a certain charm and significance that makes it a classic.

And perhaps the only Mailer I was ever able to get through and/or enjoy. There is something about this particular piece that captured my attention and held it throughout.

Maybe it's the unique writing style, the engaging story, or the profound themes explored.

Whatever the reason, it stands out among the works of Mailer for me.

I found myself completely immersed in the world created by the author, and I was able to appreciate the nuances and subtleties of the text.

It's not often that a book can have such an impact on me, but this one did.

It's a testament to the talent and skill of the writer, and I'm glad that I was able to discover and enjoy this classic.

The Mobilization was a significant event in 1967, a march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. This quickly-written journalistic account by Mailer aspires to be more than just journalism. It aims to be an instant-historical novel about collective agency, cultural antagonism, and American antinomianism, or a work of history made explanatorily vital by the novelist's intuition.

Mailer makes himself the foreground figure in his narration. He presents himself in various lights: a buffoon, a comic hero, a braggart, and a small-minded literary rival. Despite his brusque and slouchy manner, he is hypersensitive to slights and status. His relationship with fellow literary men like Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald is complex, marred by a prickly sense of self-esteem.

Mailer analyzes the Vietnam War as a conflict between America's saints and its soldiers. Marching on the Pentagon, he feels a resurgence of his WWII experiences. He views the working class as hardy and cynical, and believes America is in the grip of schizophrenia due to the incompatibility between the values of small towns and the technology of corporations. The last section of the book switches to a third-person history, sketching the characters of key figures in the Mobilization effort. Four years after the Civil Rights marches, Black revolutionaries hold sway over the white left, and the Black march takes a different path from the main protest, which experiences random arrests and brutal truncheoning of young women by riot police.

First of all, we must start with the distressing notes: is it possible that the latest available edition of a book that won important awards in its time still has to be based on a dramatically old and now completely outdated translation?

"Gambit" translated as "gambetto" surely respects the chess origins of the term, but in the American English used, it is more commonly used as a synonym of "trick" (besides being the name of the most hated X-Men: we can say that Gambit is one of the worst Marvel characters?). But this is a minor error, albeit an error, and "il pranzo nudo" instead of "il pasto nudo" indicates the age of the translation (it was the title of the first Italian version), even if it is impossible that no one at Baldini&Castoldi was aware of the title that had been used for many years for a classic of literature.

But "vilain" (yes, with an l) left as it is, instead of being translated as "cattivo" (like Gambadilegno who is the bad one in the Mickey Mouse stories) or better still "avversario"? And the incredible "pollution" translated as "polluzione" instead of "inquinamento", with the result of having - from memory - "la polluzione di fiumi mari e aria"?

What a mess, but can translations that were perhaps valid at the time of the first publication be republished today when they are embarrassing?

Ok, end of the outburst. Sorry.

What do we have here? We have a strange narrative object, one of those hybrid narratives that are so loved here in Italy by Wu Ming and the like: in telling the events of a historical march (October 27, 1967) on the Pentagon to protest against the American intervention in Vietnam in which he was one of the protagonists, Norman Mailer chooses to split the narrative into two distinct ways.

First, there is the account of the march seen from the inside and narrated in the third person: Mailer throws us tons and tons of egocentrism in which practically the most used word is "Mailer", to such an extent that it makes the story difficult to digest (even if it makes us reflect that by citing the Fugs, the immense American underground group of those years of which he also seems to have some respect, you avoid saying that they take their name from his "The Naked and the Dead"), but it is still the direct vision of the march, from the rally the night before until the endless day behind bars that he and many other participants in the march and the attempt to besiege the Pentagon experienced.

Then there is the more historical part: Mailer describes in detail the preparations, the difficult construction of unity among the various participating groups (divided between a radical left, a more orthodox one, moderate participants, etc. etc... obviously difficult to get to agree: what an unheard-of story, right?) up to the day and night of the march, including the parts where he was obviously not present as he had already been arrested.

From a historical point of view, the book is perfect, and it shows a cross-section of the American left of those years in addition to reminding us of the brutality of the repressive system when it is faced with a just and indisputable cause (also here: what an unheard-of story, right?). Certainly, to enjoy it, one has to go beyond the incessant presence of the author in the first half of the book, and I admit that many times I was tempted to tell Mailer and his work to go to hell with the cry of "Get out of the way and let me see how the story is going!".

But it's worth it, really: if there were half votes, it would be three and a half stars (the translation and egocentrism could break the legs even of the most stubborn readers), so if you are passionate about the history of the twentieth century, or of the left-wing movements or simply of the old Mailer, it is a book to recover without a doubt.

**The Armies of the Night: A Disappointing Read**

The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History by Norman Mailer was a book I had high hopes for. As an old hippie, the 1967 anti-war "March on Washington" against US involvement in Vietnam is a seminal event for me. Mailer was present at the march and wrote this account as a "historically based" novel from a participant's perspective. I only discovered this book recently and was filled with anticipation as I opened it.

The back story is quite interesting. The Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman, promised to use the mental power of all the hippie-protesters to "levitate the Pentagon." They were always looking for opportunities to stage farcical pranks to draw attention to the government's perceived inanity. The March on Washington targeted the Pentagon, one of the centers of the "military-industrial complex."

However, I was disappointed with the book. In Mailer's "nonfiction novel," he places himself at the center of the story and presents himself as a hero. He declaims, opines, and laments, conflating his role in the march. I found the book to be overblown, pretentious, and wordy. The narrator sounds like a frustrated academician.

Adding a spoiler, the Pentagon did not levitate, the war in Vietnam continued until the mid-1970s, and only Mailer seems to consider himself a significant part of the 1967 March on Washington. My rating for this book is 6/10, and I finished it on 7/5/23.

This seems to be one of the fundamental achievements on which Mailer's lasting reputation stands.

It won him his first Pulitzer and was a key text in the "New Journalism" movement. Even those who don't care much for him overall often concede the book's quality, along with that of The Naked and the Dead and/or The Executioner's Song. It's easy to see why.

It takes a very critical view of what is now an almost universally unpopular war and has many passages of flowing, vivid prose that Mailer at his best could produce seemingly effortlessly. There are not many of the so-called "Mailerisms" (the fascinations with violence, the occult, astrology, etc. are mostly downplayed or absent, as are some of his thornier tendencies regarding sex, race, etc.).

Plus, he's also willing to poke fun at himself in the third-person passages concerning his participation in the central March on the Pentagon and its run-up and aftermath. I realize that all this seems like a prelude to my leveling a critical eye on the book, but I really did like it on the whole.

The writing in the short "The Metaphor Delivered" conclusion is absolutely beautiful, some of the best I've read from Mailer. His dissection of the internecine squabbling and division into smaller and smaller factions among left-leaning groups remains accurate over 50 years later.

However, one of its main problems is that at points the actual stakes of the central event don't feel worthy of Mailer's craft or the volume of the writing. He even acknowledges this during the second section. I think the first section works better because it allows him to focus on a central protagonist (himself in third-person) and take a mildly critical/gently mocking tone.

All in all, it's a fine book and work of narrative journalism, but I think Mailer did better work in other realms.

The whole thing started from a newspaper article. In Time on October 27, 1967, it was written that this scumbag, this unnecessary, this slob Norman Mailer danced on the sidewalk at the Washington pacifist demonstration. In response, Norman Mailer was forced to put his own version in writing: that on the contrary, he did indeed dance on the sidewalk at the Washington pacifist demonstration. The difference is: heaven and earth!

This book is above all a torrent of self-irony. The author finds that narrative position from which the whole story is both comic and believable: he steps out of himself and in E/3 he observes himself, the Novelist, the Peace Warrior, the figure who has seen better days, who as if in one person embodies the most irritating qualities of conservatives and liberals. This guy truly believes in his own brilliant writing qualities, but not so much that he can hide his doubts, frustrations, and sense of injury from the curious and incomprehensible outside world from the storyteller (himself). This guy on the one hand considers the Vietnam War to be the devil's work, but he watches with almost equal suspicion that mass of protesters (the consumer peace warriors: radical blacks and overly refined liberal WASP whites) with whom he is forced to ally himself. These dualities are what fill the documentary novel with fuel: the self-examination of an autonomous individual who tries with more or less success to merge his own prickly worldview with the worldview of a community - although this community has to be like a puppet on his back.

This book is an inevitable document about the Vietnam War - or rather about the non-violent movements in Washington, which had an almost indelible role in the fact that the US finally withdrew its forces from Vietnam*. Hitler would surely have put it this way: the protesters at the Pentagon "stabbed in the back" America fighting against communism - the question is of course too complicated for me to just blabber about, but I think they just made it clear that this militarily unwinnable war was also politically unwinnable. Of course, Mailer didn't see this clearly at the time - the book's ending can rather be called pessimistic - but we can now, from the future, hazard this statement.

A great book, it beautifully senses the atmosphere of the turbulent American 1960s and the background of the peace movements. However, it requires a massive historical interest to evaluate the allusions to the various right- and left-wing trends, as well as the many moralizations about the Great American Questions of the era. If this is there, then there is nothing left for us to do but enjoy this at times Pynchonesque (Bukowskian?) flow of text: Mailer's unique word pictures and descriptions, and sometimes his adventures that verge on a bad trip.

* Especially the second part of the book, which - after the absolute subjectivity of the first part - attempts to reconstruct the ominous demonstration with "historical" solidity.

The following is the rewritten and expanded article:

The biggest load of over-rated, self indulgent drivel I have ever had the misfortune to read. It was an absolute chore to plow through each and every page. I found myself constantly slogging through the text, wondering when it would finally come to an end. Just delighted to have finally finished it, so that I can now leave it to gather dust on a bookshelf somewhere. It was so dire, it was actually annoying. The story lacked any real substance or depth. The characters were one-dimensional and uninteresting. The plot was convoluted and made little sense. I would not recommend this book to anyone. It was a waste of my time and money.

Old news.

It's something that has already happened and been reported.

By the time we hear about it, it has lost its新鲜感 and excitement.

We tend to be more interested in the latest and greatest, the things that are happening right now.

Old news just doesn't have the same appeal.

It may have been important at one time, but now it's just a part of history.

We might read about it in a history book or hear about it from an older generation, but it doesn't capture our attention like new news does.

So, when we hear the words "old news," we often tune out and move on to something more interesting.

After all, there's so much new information and news out there to discover and explore.

Why waste our time on something that's already happened?

There is no Norman Mailer around today that I know of.

Matt Taibbi has a bit of Mailer's dash, but nowhere near the authority supporting his prose. (And I haven't read him in years.)

Mailer was a literary giant. He wrote about the peace march on the Pentagon in 1967 as if he were writing a novel. He put himself in the third person, infused the text with enormous humor and self-deprecation (and self-aggrandizement), and spun tiny observations into encompassing philosophies.

This is an achievement that far surpasses anything written about the current situation. We see books like Peril by Bob Woodward that are nothing more than the emptying of a reporter's notebook.

Mailer's work was filled with powerful elements. Here, we have metaphor: "For years he had been writing about the nature of totalitarianism, its need to render populations apathetic, its instrument – the destruction of mood. ... (M)ood was a scent which rose from the acts and calms of nature, and totalitarianism was a deodorant to nature. Yes, and by the logic of this metaphor, the Pentagon looked like the five-sided tip on the spout of a spray can to be used under the arm, yes, the Pentagon was spraying the deodorant of its presence all over the fields of Virginia."

We also have timeless aphorism: "Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia."

And insights into mass psychology: "The guards were here to work out the long slow stages of a grim tableau – the recapitulation of that poverty-ridden rural childhood which had left them with the usual constipated mixture of stinginess and greed, blocked compassion and frustrated desires for power."

We have lost a lot in this century. Perhaps what is missed more than anything is a Mailer to observe and warn. His unique style and profound understanding of human nature and society are sorely lacking in today's literary landscape.