Ancient Evenings
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ancient Evenings is a novel by Norman Mailer. It deals, with the lives of two protagonists, one young, one old, in a very alien ancient Egypt marked by journeys by the dead, reincarnation, and violent and hyper-sexual gods and mortals in a complex combination of historical fiction, allegory, poetic flight, confession and spiritual meditation.
The novel has had an extremely mixed criticial reception marked by a preponderance of negative reviews, some scathing [e.g., those by Benjamin DeMott, Joseph Epstein, some very favorable [e.g., those by Richard Poirier, Christopher Ricks].
Derided by many, it is included in the canonical listing of Harold Bloom in The Western Canon and books celebrated in Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 by Anthony Burgess.
