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Il fantasma di Harlot (1991)

di Norman Mailer

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1,1941616,464 (3.7)31
Fiction. Literature. Thriller. Historical Fiction. HTML:With unprecedented scope and consummate skill, Norman Mailer unfolds a rich and riveting epic of an American spy. Harry Hubbard is the son and godson of CIA legends. His journey to learn the secrets of his society—and his own past—takes him through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the “momentous catastrophe” of the Kennedy assassination. All the while, Hubbard is haunted by women who were loved by both his godfather and President Kennedy. Featuring a tapestry of unforgettable characters both real and imagined, Harlot’s Ghost is a panoramic achievement in the tradition of Tolstoy, Melville, and Balzac, a triumph of Mailer’s literary prowess.
 
Praise for Harlot’s Ghost
 
“[Norman Mailer is] the right man to exalt the history of the CIA into something better than history.”—Anthony Burgess, The Washington Post Book World
 
“Elegantly written and filled with almost electric tension . . . When I returned from the world of Harlot’s Ghost to the present I wished to be enveloped again by Mailer’s imagination.”—Robert Wilson, USA Today
 
“Immense, fascinating, and in large part brilliant.”—Salman Rushdie, The Independent on Sunday
 
“A towering creation . . . a fiction as real and as possible as actual history.”The New York Times
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”The New York Times
 
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”The New Yorker
 
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”The Washington Post
 
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”Life
 
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”The New York Review of Books
 
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”Chicago Tribune
 
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”The Cincinnati Post.
… (altro)
Aggiunto di recente daSparklingStallion, kimmyers6, Bandmember, MarkBarry1974, stebelss, ZoeARozeta, Lionman10, KeithGold, TeamRude
Biblioteche di personaggi celebriNorman Mailer
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» Vedi le 31 citazioni

I was especially interested in reading a novel said to be one of the best about the history of the CIA. I was led to it while reading Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers" (highly recommended), which was about the Dulles brothers in the Eisenhower administration.

This was my first exposure to Mailer. I was very impressed with his imagination, his story telling, his vocabulary, and his character development. He carried me along in ways that few authors have. I did fine with the novel until I reached about page 900 (80% of the book), when I started thinking about the end. But I stuck with it. And it's not unusual for me to put down a book without finishing it!

I do highly recommend that you read the author's afterword at some point before you put down the book. I jumped ahead and read it about half way through the book, and it was helpful with my grasp of what Mailer was doing with the characters, and especially why and how he chose to use people's real names in a book of fiction. ( )
  jjbinkc | Aug 27, 2023 |
El cadáver de Hugh Montague, antiguo oficial de la CIA, es descubierto flotando en un lago. El rostro de dicho cadáver está completamente desfigurado. Si bien se había desvinculado de la agencia, dónde su nombre enclave era Harlot, aún continuaba investigando lo que él llamaba «los Grandes Santones». Su desaparición abre ahora un interrogante: ¿Se ha suicidado, ha sido asesinado o es sólo un montaje para poder desaparecer de la vida pública? Harry Hubbard, vinculado directamente con Harlot, sabe que este hallazgo supone también una seria amenaza para su vida y por lo tanto decide esfumarse. Encerrado en un ruinoso hotel de Nueva York, sin nada mejor que hacer, decide escribir sus memorias.
  Natt90 | Mar 27, 2023 |
Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, and Robert Littell's The Company draw upon the same content: JFK's philandering, Chicago mobsters, and the CIA fiascos of the fifties and sixties. Both also include many of the same historical figures: Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, Jack Kennedy, J. Edgar Hover, Fidel Castro, and many others. Both include a whisper of the supernatural: Littell, the voodoo of the Louisiana Bayou and Mailer, the ghosts of New England. Both are a few hundred pages too long.
They differ, though, greatly in writing style: The Company is brutal in syntax and language; Harlot's Ghost is deeply intellectual and framed within the profound relationship between protagonist, Harrick Hubbard and Kittredge Montague.
  RonWelton | Apr 26, 2021 |
The sheer enormity of this novel was challenging at first: 1,282 pages!!! From the very beginning, I wished it came in 2 volumes - it was hard to pick up this book with one hand! I call it One Man's Saga of CIA, going from 1953 (with some flashbacks into earlier history) to 1963. Actual historical figures are not only mentioned but described in detail - CIA, FBI agents and political figures, as well as famous spies like Kim Philby, Burgess, MacLean... And among them, Harry Hubbard, our protagonist, is building his career in CIA, and one of the main reasons he is there is because he has been "intellectually seduced", as suggested by his colleague/friend/lover Kitteridge (also the wife of his CIA mentor and godfather - quite an intricate side plot here as well; Kitteridge is also the one who invented a very interesting theory of Alpha and Omega (sort of like Yin and Yang, but with different nuances...) - two parts of everyone's personality - which was used as a tool in her CIA work).

The novel has moments of danger, intrigue, occasional boredom of routine CIA tasks, improbable hypotheses of historical events, and, for me, some real eye-openers of US and world policies at the time. Vivid portraits of Fidel Castro and Jack and Robert Kennedy. Of course, it didn't take just one sitting to finish this book, I had breaks for smaller books in between. And yet, the plot was strong enough for me to be able to keep it in memory throughout. ( )
1 vota Clara53 | May 5, 2017 |
A fun, if too long novel of the CIA with crosses, double crosses, and lots of intrigue. Does provide us with some interesting insight into the Cold War, and into the world before the Berlin Wall came down. My favorite scenes are the ones actually taking place in Berlin. ( )
  dbsovereign | Jan 26, 2016 |
From the little world of Encounter to the more encompassing schemes of James Angleton and William Casey, all of us have been slightly deranged by the work of this giant cultural and political construct. And now, with the unsolved and unpunished penumbra and personnel of Iran–Contra, we have fuel for more and later conspiracy theories. But as the Cold War at last abates, having so wasted our lives and energies, we can blink our opening eyes at the monsters engendered in the long sleep of reason. It is Mailer’s achievement to have summoned the ghosts of paranoia and conspiracy in order to demystify them, and in so doing to have raised realism to the level of fiction.
 
A book as massive as this enters one's life. Taking it up after some flimsy frippery of effete Europe, one recognizes that Tolstoy's ghost haunts America, and that Mailer, whose laying reputation is as great as that of a champion Rhode Island red, is the man to lay it.

War and Peace was not too big to encompass the Napoleonic impact on Imperial Russia. Is perhaps Harlot's Ghost pretentious in supposing that the CIA has a comparable historical significance?...

He was the right man to exalt the history of the CIA into something better than history. He is writing as well as he ever did, and his stamina is awesome. He reminds us, as Balzac and Dickens do, that the novel is more than diversion. Harlot's Ghost is to be read in the White House as well as in Langley, and it ought to pored over in the sancta of our own MI6. But it is for us, the lowly governed, as well.
aggiunto da SnootyBaronet | modificaWashington Post, Anthony Burgess (Sep 29, 1991)
 
Slick the book certainly is not. But a page-turner it is for a great deal of the time, and none the worse for it. The best sequences in the book, all of which involve the CIA in action, require a certain breathlessness, as the operatives spin through their madcap motions faster than the speed of thought; as with the Red Queen in Alice this is the pace they have to maintain in spyland just to stay in the same place.
 

» Aggiungi altri autori (2 potenziali)

Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Mailer, Normanautore primariotutte le edizioniconfermato
Häilä, ArtoTraduttoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato

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For we wrestle, not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness
of this world, against spiritual wickedness
in high places.
—Ephesians, 6:12
BELINDA: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil.
LADY BRUTE: That may be a mistake in the translation.
—Sir John Vanbrugh
The Provoked Wife
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire,
My Soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
—Theodore Roethke
In a Dark Time
Dedica
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To Jason Epstein
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In a late winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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Fiction. Literature. Thriller. Historical Fiction. HTML:With unprecedented scope and consummate skill, Norman Mailer unfolds a rich and riveting epic of an American spy. Harry Hubbard is the son and godson of CIA legends. His journey to learn the secrets of his society—and his own past—takes him through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the “momentous catastrophe” of the Kennedy assassination. All the while, Hubbard is haunted by women who were loved by both his godfather and President Kennedy. Featuring a tapestry of unforgettable characters both real and imagined, Harlot’s Ghost is a panoramic achievement in the tradition of Tolstoy, Melville, and Balzac, a triumph of Mailer’s literary prowess.
 
Praise for Harlot’s Ghost
 
“[Norman Mailer is] the right man to exalt the history of the CIA into something better than history.”—Anthony Burgess, The Washington Post Book World
 
“Elegantly written and filled with almost electric tension . . . When I returned from the world of Harlot’s Ghost to the present I wished to be enveloped again by Mailer’s imagination.”—Robert Wilson, USA Today
 
“Immense, fascinating, and in large part brilliant.”—Salman Rushdie, The Independent on Sunday
 
“A towering creation . . . a fiction as real and as possible as actual history.”The New York Times
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”The New York Times
 
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”The New Yorker
 
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”The Washington Post
 
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”Life
 
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”The New York Review of Books
 
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”Chicago Tribune
 
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”The Cincinnati Post.

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