Volume 54, Number 2 · February 15, 2007
Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist
By J.M. Coetzee
The Castle in the Forest
by Norman Mailer
Random House, 477 pp., $27.95
In his dual biography of the two bloodiest butchers and worst moral monsters of the twentieth century, Stalin and Hitler (but is Mao not up there with them? and does Pol Pot not get a look-in?), Alan Bullock reprints side by side class photographs of young Iosif and young Adolf taken in 1889 and 1899 respectively, in other words, when each was about ten.[*] Peering at the two faces, one tries to descry some quiddity, some dark halo, some sly intimation of the horrors to come; but the photographs are old, definition is poor, one cannot be sure, and besides, a camera is not a divining tool.
Review, 5350 words
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