the naked and the dead Norman Mailer: Even in Death, An Award-Winning Perv
Now that he's up and died, Norman Mailer will—like Kafka, Borges, and Anna Nicole before him—forever be denied his Nobel, a prize reserved for alive people only. But, no matter! London's Literary Review has just named Mailer's pulp Hitler novel The Castle in the Forest winner of its annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. The old cad beat out young finalists Ali Smith and Christopher Rush for the honor; evidently, no need for Viagra when you've got rigor mortis. But the judges assure us this was no sympathy vote. As Review assistant editor Philip Womack told the Guardian, "It was the excrement that tipped the balance."
"That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'. That was pretty awful."
In case you were wondering, "the excrement" wasn't manly Mailer talking about santorum; it's what your uncle's flaccid penis looks like. From the winning passage:
<quote> So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew....So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.
The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! </quote>
And now he's dead!
Flash of bad sex wins Norman Mailer coveted book prize [Guardian] <http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2217967,00.html>