I can only tell you my experience of the book.It was knocking on the door of greatness. The beginning was staggering, and I was floored by the musicality of its sentences, its startling imagery, and the depth of thought that made these ancient Egyptians remind me, as others before me, of aliens in a science fiction novel – that is, the past is an alien world. I was having an encounter with this novel, like you have with extraterrestials or great beasts. This reached its pitch with the Battle of Kadesh, whose inspirations were the Old Testament and the Iliad, and where Mailer, in the whole chapter devoted to the battle, gives his sentences the rush and rhythm of chariot wheels. Awesome battle scene. So far, with me, he hadn’t put a foot wrong. Thomas Mann went wrong in Egypt with the ornate style, for me: I loved his first Joseph books but in Egypt I sank into the sands of his Biblical loquacity. But Mailer, as Old Testamenty as he, hadn’t spent a word too much, he was music to my ears. Then I hit the Book of Queens. It was atrocious, and the novel never clawed up from that low – until perhaps the last five pages. As for the sex content. In the parts I admired, I didn’t feel it was gratuitous or ill-done. I’ll thank him for his lessons in unhealthy psychology. Once I read a book – which I won’t even link to, because I hated the book and thought it bad history – that told me how common in the ancient world was war rape, man to man: as a further vanquishment of a defeated enemy. So, there’s much oneupmanship in here, where they use such methods to humiliate and see who’s ahead of who. It’s effing unhealthy, like I say; nevertheless, when I read that aforementioned nonfiction I was disturbed and disgusted, whereas Mailer doesn’t set out to disturb and disgust me and he didn’t. When he has a humiliate-the-captive scene entirely from the point of view of the unapologetic perpetrator, I felt I was given insight, in the way fiction can.None of what I’ve just said goes for the latter part of the book, where sex is stupid, gratuitous and features women. I had already noticed that he never has women raped. Is that pushing it, even for him? I had to wonder. But in these stretches you soon notice every single woman is a sex addict, and... spare me. It’s worse than I can say. The music is lost too, since he’s thrown discipline to the winds; and the Egyptians aren’t aliens now, they live in your closest daytime soap. He took ten years to write this, as he lets us know at the end. Maybe he had a brain explosion along the way.
This is an odd one.This is, I think, what Stephen King was trying to say about writing even big books across the length of a season and no longer. Few authors can pull off greatness when it comes to projects they hold on to for too long. They get complicated, overly dense, they hold onto passages that should be snipped out, they forget the eureka moment that spurred the author to write them, they suffer from Will Self’s everything-itis.Heller was successful with Something Happened and likely other books of his, but when it comes to tomes as dense as William H. Gass’, I like what John Gardner said: “The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” I’m completely unable to think of more dense tomes at the moment because I just woke up, but hopefully you see what I’m saying :).Mailer did a whole load of research for this one and wanted to pack a lot of Egyptian history into this book. However, this means compromising a lot on putting the reader into a scene. What I mean is, in order to create a book this dense, Mailer has to use a lot of narrative summary and a lot of that thing you’re bored of reading in reviews, often patronisingly italicised: telllllllllling not shooooooooowing. For example, I could say “On the 22nd of February 2013, I shot the family cat.” Or I could say “Heat. Light. For the fiftieth fucking time I awoke with the sensation of a stinging scratch like a feline-sized rapier sliced out my left cheek again, but newly accompanying this was a creeping vengeance in my core: Mittens was fucking getting it. I stumbled out of bed…” and so on for, like, 20, 100 pages. Whatever. But in stretching out the tale (tail lol) I lack compression and am unable to put so many events in my book. But if I compress too much, I’m not painting a scene for the reader. And this is where Mailer understandably suffers. He couldn’t choose what to focus on, so he put in everything. This book should be maybe 7 different volumes which comprise a fully expanded story, every scene painted in Mailer’s best Proustian prose, but if this was the case, would I read them all? Probably not. Would I enjoy volume 1 of that expanded book more than I enjoyed this? Probably, but I’d also be left with the dissatisfaction that I’d begun a series I didn’t want to finish. So I accept this feeling as an inevitability of the project.Like a sub-par Vollmann or a Pynchon mis-step. But in terms of literature overall, that still ranks it way way highly :)
What do You think about Ancient Evenings (1997)?
Given that this book inspired Burrough`s ``Western lands , and a new film by Matthew Barney `River of Fundament`, as well as countless other artists and writers since it`s publication it might have to go down as one of the most influential bad books ever written because I for one have never seen a legitimate positive review of it .I TRIED TO READ IT WHEN I WAS A KID 18-19 and never got past the first remarkable pages but I memorized the first page and I can still recite it (almost accurately).This contradictory response seems almost universal .It may be a mess of a book with many passages of pure drivel but it is an artifact of enduring curiosity and temple-scratching uniqueness.I cannot help feeling that it suffers from being not quite conventional narrative or `postmodern`but lost somewhere in between.This might account for it`s almost unreadable heft.I can`t help also noting that a thousand well-written books come and go and never have the influence or provocative power of a curiosity like this.It is a failure of a novel. But what was it Beckett said about failure.`It is the artists job to fail`` .
—Anthony Bolton
I heard a podcast interview with the surrealist filmmaker Matthew Barney and he described his fascination with this book. Ancient Evenings surprised me because I never realized that Norman Mailer wrote this very out-there book that defies any trend and seems completely out of context- as if it could have been written in Ancient times or modern times without any clear allegory or lesson and in that quite dream like.Ancient Evenings transported me into ancient Egypt and convincingly took on the perspective of an ancient Egyptian. Seeing this world through the eyes of an Egyptian prince at the end of a dynasty as he stands on the brink of the afterlife. I lived through the day to day life of royalty such as fears of lice, dependence on the Nile floods, harems of women, diefication of the Pharoh (intense unquestioned patriarchy), and constant deference to the gods. Mailer also brought it in some intriguing speculation/scholarship about the primal habits and superstitions of Egyptian royalty. It seemed every chapter had some sexual charge. If there was not explicit sex there was a lot of innuendo. Mailer had an expansive and poetic vocabulary throughout the book and especially for sex scenes- using Ancient Egyptian symbols in his prose. For example, a chariot wheel becomes an anus in a story about a dream. The sex always had an overtone of domination and included powerful men or gods dominating other men, women, or gods either by f*cking them or cutting off their genitals. It was very graphic.The book was so absorbing and convincing it really made me dislike life in Ancient Egypt. The cosmology was fascinating and Mailer's writing had some lovely details and allusions, but by the end of the book I was so tired of the Ancient Egyptian world it was a relief to close it up. I do not want to go back.
—David
Beyond any doubt, Mailer can write: witness the incredibly vivid, disorienting, existentially-inebriated explosiveness of a Nile-nourished soul's rupturing reincarnation within fleshly garb that opens Ancient Evenings. This was so well done that my hopes for the thickish remainder was nigh unbounded. Alas, Mailer also cannot seem to discipline himself, and his voluminous story progressively spirals into sheer authorial indulgence, almost as if all thoughts of the patient reader accompanying such hyperkinetic outpourings were abandoned amidst the exuberance of linguistically capturing everything feral, carnal, kinetic, and mytho-spiritual that popcorn-burst within Mailer's feverish imagination and nailing it down to the page. As a significant number of my fellow reviewers have made note of, the amount of buggery, grotesque violence, flowery rhetoric, and divine Coptic name-dropping that litters Ancient Evenings proves mind-numbing; rather than shocking or enthralling with its air of casual admission, it renders what should have invoked the portentous and mysterious at a visceral level into an off-key bugling of the tedious and ridiculous. Oh-Sayh-Kann-Yu-Seeh's bung is flowering from sperm seed! Call the Nilotic plumber! That's not to say the book isn't ultimately worth reading, mind—or at least skimming—for the historic trappings, sanguinary armed clashing, ritualistic priestly lubricating, mnemonic Nile barge cruising, and vividly-illustrated details of ancient Egyptian life, with all of its tactile connections to the primordial and unearthly, yet makes for interesting reading material. Rather, it's a rueful nod to the fact that Mailer's inability to restrain himself means not only that a large number of readers will never undertake to finish (or even begin) this novel, but that those with the fortitude to do so will have been cheated out of what should have proved a far more illuminating, rewarding, and challenging literary experience.
—Szplug
