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Summary
Summary
The novel that stunned--and scandalized--Europe comes to America
Wolf, a low-rent private detective, roams London's gloomy, grimy streets, haunted by dark visions of a future that could have been--and a dangerous present populated by British Fascists and Nazis escaping Germany. Shomer, a pulp fiction writer, lies in a concentration camp, imagining another world. And when Wolf and Shomer's stories converge, we find ourselves drawn into a novel both shocking and profoundly haunting.
At once a perfectly pitched hard-boiled noir thriller (with an utterly shocking twist) and a "Holocaust novel like no other" ( The Guardian ), A Man Lies Dreaming is a masterful, unforgettable literary experiment from "one of our best and most adventurous writers" ( Locus ).
Author Notes
LAVIE TIDHAR is the World Fantasy Award -winning author of The Violent Century, Osama, and many other books. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella and has been nominated for many other prizes. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and in South Africa but currently lives in London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Even devoted fans of revisionist fiction might blanche at the premise of Tidhar's latest, which supposes that the National Socialists lost their bid for Germany in 1933, after which the country fell into the hands of Jewish Communists in an event known as the Fall. Now it's 1939 and an underworld of ex-Nazis has taken root in London, where they are essentially an oppressed minority. One of their number is Wolf, a hard-bitten detective with a mysterious past, who breaks his rule against taking on Jewish clients to locate a beautiful woman's missing sister. Soon Wolf is enmeshed in the search for a murderer, uncovering a conspiracy with links to the identity he left behind in Nuremberg and will go to any length to keep hidden. And then there are the dreams that haunt Wolf: dreams of a man named Shomer, a prisoner in a concentration camp who himself dreams of another world. This sounds provocative and transgressive, but the execution is strictly by the numbers. The noir elements are deadeningly predictable and Wolf's investigation quickly turns into a game of spot-the-historical-figure. This is a toothless exercise of What If topped with a trite twist. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Multiple-award-winning author Tidhar (The Violent Century, 2013) crafts another success with this pulpy take on alternate history. Wolf has fled from Germany to London in 1939 after Communists defeated Nazis at the polls, trading his role as an influential political player for that of a struggling private detective. Wealthy Jewish socialite Isabella Rubenstein approaches Wolf to find her missing sister, certain that Wolf's former association with the smuggler hired to bring her sister from Germany makes him most equipped to solve her disappearance. Poverty dictates that Wolf squash his race hatred and accept the work. It's not his only job; tension over the influx of German immigrants has catapulted Oswald Mosley and his Fascist Blackshirts to the height of political power, and Mosley hires his former political ally, Wolf, to identify the assassins attempting to halt his rise. A killer calling himself the Watcher further complicates matters by implicating Wolf in a string of grisly prostitute murders. Meanwhile, Shomer, a pulp-fiction writer held in a concentration camp, creates a noir world populated by shadowy criminals, femmes fatales, and backstabbing allies. How are Wolf and Shomer connected? Readers will figure that out quickly, but no matter. Everything in this genre-bender works; intriguing historical characters are worked into expertly managed plots, and the visceral noir atmosphere is juxtaposed nicely against the drawing-room world of London's political scene.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"HOW DOES ONE write the Holocaust?" That question, buried in the brief but intriguing "Historical Note" appended to Lavie Tidhar's scabrous pulp-noir, "A Man Lies Dreaming," remains a relevant and vexed one decades after Theodor Adorno opined that writing a poem after the Holocaust was barbaric. It is relevant because the literature of the Holocaust continues to be written anew, as the first generation of survivors bent on documenting the obscene reality of the ghettos and concentration camps (Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski) has yielded to a second - and now third - generation more at ease with imaginative retellings, be they fictional accounts of the events (Jerzy Kosinski, Imre Kertesz, Leslie Epstein) or alternate histories (Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson). It is vexed because the Holocaust still carries an undeniable emotional charge and an inexorable moral weight more than 70 years after it occurred. And so one may find oneself asking when reading this self-consciously daring but ultimately schlocky sendup, as I did, What did the Holocaust do to deserve this? Other questions I have: When is a genre-bending meta-novel no longer a clever postmodern conceit but merely a pretext for puerile shenanigans? When is laughing in the dark no longer an inspired response to trauma but simply an evasion of unbearable pain? This is not to say that there is no room for humor when it comes to genocide, or what has sometimes been referred to as the "Shoah business" - witness Art Spiegelman's splenetic "Maus," the dark comedy of Leslie Epstein's "King of the Jews" and the grim wit of Martin Amis's "The Zone of Interest" - but that the satire or parody had better be first-rate. Tidhar's novel juggles many literary devices, including ostentatious stylistic borrowings from the hard-boiled oeuvre of Raymond Chandler and the use of a novel within a novel, as well as diary notations, endnotes and appropriations from Primo Levi and the writer known as KaTzetnik. Its main plot concerns a downand-out gumshoe whose nom de guerre is Wolf, on the prowl in dingiest 1939 London some years after the so-called Fall, when National Socialism lost its brief sway over Germany to the Communists in the 1933 elections. Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts are on the rise, beating up Jews and other undesirable types; a serial killer is loose among the whores who gather in Berwick Street; and a gang of Jewish terrorists who call themselves the P.L.O. are demanding a homeland for the Jews. I don't know whether the true identity of Tidhar's protagonist is supposed to come as a slow-dawning revelation - it isn't until Page 274 that he expressly names himself: "I'm Hitler! I'm Hitler! I'm Hitler!" - but for anyone who knows anything about the dictator's life, the mystery, even without the infamous abridged mustache ("He could no longer abide the mustache"), is shortlived. Coy hints appear already in the opening pages, with an allusion to a woman in Wolf's past named Geli (Hitler's reallife niece, to whom he was suspiciously close and who may have killed herself or may have been murdered by Hitler) and a mention of Wolf's father, Alois, which happens to be the name of Hitler's father. Wolf, who seems to have no aptitude for detective work, is hired by Isabella Rubinstein, a beautiful Jewess ("She was a tall drink of pale milk"), to find her sister, who has gone missing somewhere between being smuggled out of Germany and landing in London. He is a rabid anti-Semite, needless to say - "The Jews are nothing but money-grubbers, living on the profits of war," he thinks when Isabella offers him a roll of 10-shilling notes, but he can use the cash. As Wolf descends into the seedier depths of London in search of Isabella's sister, displaced Nazis of every guise turn up, reminding the private eye of his former power and how far he and his comrades have fallen from their glory days. These range from Rudolf Hess (once deputy Führer to Hitler), who wears "riding boots and a paunch," to Josef Kramer (called the Beast of Belsen by Bergen-Belsen inmates), who has "a boxer's round face and a scar on his left cheek." Along the way we meet up with Ilse Koch, who was the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and known for her sadistic behavior - here she appears as a dommatrix, equipped with a whip and a smile "like a deformed butterfly" - and there are references to various others of the dastardly cast of characters, like "gimp-leg Goebbels," "fat ruthless" Göring and "ratlike" Julius Streicher. Meanwhile, bit by bit, we are introduced to another novel entirely, this one set in Auschwitz and inhabited by Shomer, the dreaming man of the title, who happens to be a writer of shund, or pulp fiction: "He had had some success. He was read by yeshiva boys in secret, passing his books from hand to hand; by young Zionists filled with ideological fervor ...; by the rabbis who confiscated the books from their wards, by the women who picked them up for a few kopecks along with a bag of onions in the shop, by intellectuals who railed against this prostituting of literature, by wealthy merchants and farmers." Shomer is presumably diverting himself from the horrors of life behind barbed wire by concocting the narrative we are reading, although the two stories never explicitly connect except for a moment at the very end when he has reached Palestine and spots a ship "gliding into safe harbor." The ship is the Exodus, on which who should be traveling but Wolf himself, masquerading as Moshe Wolfson on a stolen Jewish passport, reduced by adverse circumstances to babbling in Yiddish. "Don't you worry about me, bubeleh," he tells the nurse ministering to him after he has been shot at or dealt a deathly blow, I wasn't sure which, by a minion of Goebbels, and equipped with a recent circumcision courtesy of Isabella's rich banker father. Ach, there is so much I have left out from this blood-soaked, sex-filled account, but what is a poor reviewer to do with such a punch-drunk book in such a limited space? The sex, to be sure, is invariably, cartoonishly sadomasochistic, in keeping with Hitler's reputed tastes, and the violence is never-ending, although I couldn't help noticing that when someone called Virgil, who announces himself as in the employ of "the president of the United States of America" (another dizzying subplot), attacks Nazism, all Wolf can muster up is a weak "I beg your pardon?" Then again, Wolf isn't much for consistency: While he suggests at one point that he, like Hitler, loves dogs - "People were out walking their dogs. I missed Prinz and Muckl very much at that moment" - Wolf has no compunction about describing America as "a racial cesspit... fit only for dogs and Jews." BUT I AM undoubtedly being too much of a critic, hewing too closely to the text. What this wild spoof really demands, with its implausible images ("When he grinned his big square teeth looked like coral reefs buried under a murky sea") and its unlikely sentiments that seem to exist only to indicate that the author has read Philip Roth ("I will be your whore, if you'd only let me!") or listened to Bob Dylan ("Once I had held all of Germany in the palm of my hand"), is a certain abandonment, a giving-over of one's critical senses to the larger cause of unrestrained merriment. Except for a few cunning historical touches - like the casual mention of Syrie Maugham, the interior decorator and ex-wife of Somerset Maugham who pioneered a simple, whiteon-white style - and one comically engaging scene in which Wolf attends a book party peopled with Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood, where he argues with a publisher who rejected "Mein Kampf," "A Man Lies Dreaming" struck me as a juvenile and unsubtle effort. It would be easy to dismiss this novel, which comes bearing high praise from British reviewers, as an affront to good taste, but that would be to play into its hands. Better, it seems to me, to say that there is something too easy about its provocations, too unearned about its shock effects. Tidhar, who grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lives in London, has won awards for his science fiction, which includes an earlier novel called "Osama" that deployed a similar convention of the real world bleeding into a fantasy one. He certainly knows his Holocaust - the book includes quotations from Gustl's "The Young Hitler I Knew" as well as from "Mein Kampf" - but the uses to which he has put his knowledge are of questionable value, suggestive of little that is enlightening about that catastrophe or the mad genius who set it in motion. DAPHNE MERKIN is a cultural critic and novelist whose most recent book is an essay collection, "The Fame Lunches."
Kirkus Review
A down-on-his-luck Hitler, now working as a private detective in London, searches for a missing Jewish girl in this wild, noir-infused alternative history from genre-bender Tidhar (Osama, 2011, etc.) After the communists take over Germany in the early 1930s, the one-time leader of the National Socialists, now calling himself Wolf, escapes to London, where he tweaks his appearance ever so slightly ("He could no longer abide the moustache") and sets up shop as a gumshoe. His need for cash supersedes his virulent anti-Semitism, and soon he's in the employ of Isabella Rubinstein ("a tall drink of pale milk"), on the hunt for her sister, who was smuggled out of Germany by ex-Nazis but seems to have vanished. If the proceedings sound pulpish, it's because they're the imaginings of Shomer, once a "purveyor of Yiddish shund"lowbrow detective stories and the likenow a prisoner at Auschwitz. Tidhar deftly shifts between these two worlds, dedicating the majority of the novel to Wolf's "fictional" London of 1939 but also illuminating Shomer's horrible reality, all the while crafting a mystery that is absorbing in its own right. As Wolf hunts for the girl, he begins to investigate his former associates, and Tidhar has good fun populating the story with real-life characters whose lives have taken unexpected turns: Hermann Gring is now "a simple pimp," Leni Riefenstahl works for Warner Bros. The presence of a Hitler-obsessed serial killer and Wolf's association with Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist now running for prime minister, keep things moving. The story isn't for the weak of heart: Tidhar/Shomer revels in describing Wolf's sexual proclivities, and at least one torture scene won't be easy for readers to forget. But though at times the narrative feels almost farcical, Shomer's presence imbues it with unexpected weight, resulting in an ending that is more gut punch than punch line. A wholly original Holocaust story: as outlandish as it is poignant. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
How do you make sense of the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of so many people for the sole fact of belonging to a different tribe? World Fantasy Award winner -Tidhar's (Osama) answer is to create a world of his own and place Adolf Hitler smack dab in the middle of it. The Communists win in Germany in 1933 and Hitler flees. In 1939, now named Wolf, he's a none-too--successful private eye operating out of a rundown office in a neighborhood populated by losers and whores in London. Oswald Mosley's fascist Blackshirts roam the streets terrorizing people: Mosley is about to be elected prime minister. Then a beautiful woman approaches the failed führer and asks him to locate her missing sister. Mosley wants Wolf to find out who's behind assassination attempts against him. Meanwhile, in Wolf's neighborhood, someone is killing prostitutes. Elsewhere, in Auschwitz, Shomer dreams, talks to the dead, anything to numb his thinking of his own loss. The two narratives merge in a Chandler-esque mystery, which is also a lurid S&M thriller and a jarring tale of a grim, gray alternative world. VERDICT Seldom will readers come across fantasy as well conceived and well written as this exceptional novel, a 2015 winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.