A Man Lies Dreaming

by Lavie Tidhar

The next novel from Lavie Tidhar, the award-winning author of THE VIOLENT CENTURY.

Deep in the heart of history's most infamous concentration camp, a man lies dreaming. His name is Shomer, and before the war he was a pulp fiction author. Now, to escape the brutal reality of life in Auschwitz, Shomer spends his nights imagining another world - a world where a disgraced former dictator now known only as Wolf ekes out a miserable existence as a low-rent PI in London's grimiest streets.

An extraordinary story of revenge and redemption, A Man Lies Dreaming is the unforgettable testament to the power of imagination.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Alternate History, Fantasy, Mystery, Science Fiction, Crime

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 23, 2014

About the author

Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century.

Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist.

Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.

He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).

Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie.

His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century.

Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).

Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012).

He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there.

He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).

Tidhar lives with his wife in London.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Auschwitz concentration camp, a former pulp writer named Shomer imagines a world where the Nazis never came to power and a certain dictator is a down and out private investigator named Wolf. Wolf is hired to find a woman named Judith Rubinstein, who may have been smuggled out of communist Germany. Can Wolf find Judith and figure out who is pulling the strings of his former allies?

I stumbled upon this book during my brief alternate history binge during what 2.0 called my Summer of Love. Since I dug The Bookman and HebrewPunk, I gave it a shot.

Grown from the same literary roots as The Man in the High Castle, A Man Lies Dreaming is a tale of what might have been, if the communists had risen to power in Germany in the 1930s instead of the Nazis.

Using Shomer as a framing device, Lavie Tidhar shows who Hitler might have become without power, a fearful, hateful, pathetic man with little direction. Parts of the tale are darkly funny, which makes sense since Shomer is dreaming the tale to forget about the horrors of Auschwitz.

I'm not sure why Wolf being a loser private detective in London works so well but it does. Wolf takes a more blows to the head than Lew Archer as he tries to track down Judith Rubinstein, making a lot of enemies in the process. Wolf is a slightly sympathetic lead until you remember how things went in real life. It's pretty satisfying to read the ass-kickings he takes and to see his impotent rage. Not to mention the kinky sex...

The books ends a little differently than I thought it would but it was still satisfying. Tidhar's copius research is apparent in the afterword, which I normally don't read. Thankfully, he doesn't suffer from the "work all research into the book" syndrome a lot of authors suffer from.

Lavie Tidhar has come a long way in the short time I've been aware of his work. A Man Lies Dreaming is both a great alternate history detective tale and a commentary on racism and the way we treat immigrants, something that sadly never goes out of style. Four out of five stars.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIn8g...


Written in a style that perfectly emulates the classic noir mysteries of the 30s and 40s, this little book knocked me off my feet almost from the first page. I had really enjoyed Tidhar’s delicious steampunk novel (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) but I hadn’t heard of this book at all, until a GR friend recommended it, if I had enjoyed “The Bookman”; well, thank you Paul, this was, as you described, insane and unique in the best possible way!

I’ve read a fair amount of alt-WWII books (“The Man in the High Castle” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., “Fatherland” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and “The Plot Against America” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and they are usually written as a speculation on what might have happened had Hitler won. “A Man Lies Dreaming” goes into the completely opposite direction, and wonders what might have happened if the Communists had taken over Germany, instead of the Nazis. What if the British Union of Fascists had been well placed to win the election, making England one of the few places where a defeated man by the name of Adolf Hitler could escape to after his Fall from grace?

A man who goes by the name of Wolf scrapes a living as a private investigator. He could have had an easier and more comfortable life, but it would have meant compromising his pride and his integrity. As things are, he gets by. One day, a Jewish woman asks him to find her sister, who was smuggled out of Germany a few weeks before and has since vanished, and despite Wolf’s insistence that he won’t work for Jews, he takes the job anyway. Like in any good noir novel, the case is anything but as simple as it seems, and Wolf will soon be stuck in a complicated web of human trafficking, Zionist terrorists, old allies turned enemies and extremely weird BDSM. But in a very different world, a former pulp writer by the name of Shomer dreams of revenge, as only a writer of crime novels can, while being imprisoned in Auschwitz...

Of all the alt-WWII books I’ve read, this actually reminded me the most of “La Part de l’Autre” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), as what Tidhar is saying that sometimes, a watershed moment of history really hinges on something very small going one way or another, that those we know as the monsters of history are just as dependent as we are on sheer dumb luck at time, that WWII was probably inevitable regardless of who was in power at the time, and that, as Geoff sings in his beautiful version of “Zog nit keyn mol”, it is absolutely OK to kick a Nazi in the pants. I’ve read a review that mentions that as WWII Jewish revenge fantasies go, this has a lot in common with “Inglorious Basterds” (arguably one of my favorite movies): I can see that, but like Schmitt’s book, “A Man Lies Dreaming” speculates specifically about Hitler’s personality, something both fascinating and repulsive to think about. As Tidhar points out in the historical note at the end of the novel, despite all the books written on the subject, there is little that is known with much certainty about Hitler, making it easy to fill in the blanks- in this case, as luridly as possible.

A very well written, completely twisted story of what might have happened. Weird as fuck, but worth every star.

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe I’m giving this book 5 stars, but I’m too much in awe of what Tidhar has pulled off here.

This is an alternate history roman noir starring Hitler (yes, Hitler) as a down-at-heel private investigator. In this universe, the Nazis lost the 1933 elections, and Hitler emigrated to London, where he earns a meagre living as a sleuth. But wait, there's more: all of this is the story a Yiddish pulp fiction writer is composing in his head as a means to escape the brutal reality of day-to-day life in Auschwitz.

That's the book. As befuddling as the premise sounds, Tidhar doesn’t take his subject matter lightly, and pulls heavily from a wealth of historical facts and sources to build his protagonist’s psyche and the circumstances surrounding him. I started the book chuckling bemusedly to myself, but after a few chapters, lo and behold, this daft conceit started to sound convincing.

Tidhar offers us a fascinating thought experiment in this novel, forcing us to contemplate what would have been of Hitler had he been ousted before he had time to implement his monstrous policies. What we’re left with is an angry little man, an angst-ridden racist at odds with the world, but - and this is key - someone who is ultimately human and frail, frustrated and insecure, the mirror opposite of the larger-than-life idea of Hitler we now have no trouble thinking of as the personification of evil itself.

Behind every great historical figure lies a man who may have gone through life being a nobody had fate dealt him a different hand. The idea is provocative, perhaps even in bad taste, but I admire Tidhar’s balls for jumping straight to Godwin’s law and putting none other than Hitler on the dissection table to make his point.

While there’s something undeniably therapeutic about seeing Hitler pushed around, ignored, teased, used and abused, there’s also a sinister underside to all this, which is that he ends up becoming relatable, and - shock and horror - you even find yourself rooting for him. The fact that the ‘bad guys’ of the story are a bunch of depraved evil Jews just makes the situation even more morally confusing.

The violence Hitler suffers in this novel doesn’t have the cathartic nature of other Nazixplotation works (vide Inglorious Basterds), it’s there to drive home the twisted point Tidhar’s trying to make. This isn’t Hitler-as-we-know-him being brutally attacked; this is a potential Hitler-as-we-know-him, who still hasn’t committed any atrocity other than having morally reprehensible racist and imperialist ideas (I mean, come on, we’ve all had that one guy in high-school, right?). It's basically the old 'Is it morally acceptable to punch a Nazi?' debacle but weaved into the subtext of a detective story.

Another interesting question Tidhar poses is whether it would have been enough to oust Hitler from power to avoid WWII and the Holocaust, or whether Hitler's popularity would have been enough to start a chain reaction leading to the same end one way or another? The reasoning behind this being that the moment someone with vile populist ideas is given a public platform, he then spawns imitators who'll ape his same rhetoric to get elected in other countries (something worth thinking about in our day and age).

This book is not for everyone. If you are appalled by the fact that I’m even entertaining these hypotheticals, then don’t go anywhere near it. It takes your mind to dark strange places indeed. Then there’s the very graphic violence and BDSM sex. I thought it was appropriate, as this book is also a heartfelt homage to pulp fiction, and these scenes certainly help bring that feeling of reading lurid rubbish to life. Anyway, you know your limits. If you think you can handle it, give detective Hitler a chance.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Certain novels are so rich that they beggar the imagination. This one dives deep into the hidden recesses of alternate histories and pure Noir pulp in a very satisfying romp. Or is it a transformative detective piece? SF, or a commentary on what it really means to be ... led by crazy ideas?

Let's say it. The big surprise. Wolf, the PI living in London, was actually the failed Socialist Party Leader from Germany who lost the election in '33. That's right. He is Hitler. And Germany is overrun by communists. And England seems to be full of his old cronies who have left him behind to become thugs on their own.

Rich, rich, rich stuff here. And it's a great noir, dealing with pride, being broken, Jewish employers, and lots of references to Hitler's book and the publishing industry. Failed book, I might add. :)

I had a great time. None of it was in your face or obvious except for the careful reader, except, perhaps, by the end of the novel, but that's not really the main point.

Oddly enough, I loved one aspect more than all the rest. Hitler's weird transformation into a Jew. It didn't happen right away and had lots of good reasons behind it, like being undercover, but SO MUCH happens that turns our history on its head and pours it all on this poor man... even making him sympathetic in a way... as he lives, learns, and through his embitterment, makes us feel.

I've read nothing like this. It is a class of its own. :) Not a satire. Indeed, rather careful, very mystery-oriented, and often disturbing, but not for the usual reasons. And then, the framing device of the dreaming man, living in a concentration camp... well, that's another added bonus that just makes me think and think. :)

Really enjoyable novel. And btw, it's tied to Unholy Land. I would recommend reading A Man Lies Dreaming first.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially I resisted picking this up because it just sounded too over the top ridiculous. And it is, conceptually, yet the execution is solidly rooted in an excellent, multi layered noir style mystery set against an incredibly fraught political background, that all told works exceedingly well. Throughout, Wolf (i.e. Hitler, though not named as such) is perpetually demeaned - physically, sexually, emotionally - by himself and others. While that's gratifying at some level, there's much more to the dark humor suffusing both the narrative as well as framing meta narrative. Tidhar achieves this through a juxtaposition of Wolf's seething, thinly veiled fury and sense of superiority, which still lays at his core from his days as Nazi ubermensch, and the stark reality in which he now finds himself a struggling private detective and refugee, hollowed out, untethered and largely forgotten by the world. The story is in turns shocking, revolting, somber and deeply poignant. Props to Lavie Tidhar for pulling off a remarkable gem of speculative fiction!

[Daniel Polansky]

Look, I didn’t want to read anything else by Lavie Tidhar, OK? I felt like I’d sort of done my duty as a very casual friend of by reading A Violent Century a month or two back, but he just kept on and on and fucking on. Read my book about Hitler, he said. I already read it, Lavie. No, he said, a different book about Hitler. And then he called me a bunch of unrepeatable names and then he sent me a review copy of A Man Lies Dreaming.
A Man Lies Dreaming is the story of a writer of Yiddish pulp fiction, who, while dying in Auschwitz, envisions a vengeful alternative reality in which the Fuhrer is forced to make ends meet as an exile in London. A low rent private detective, Wulf, as Hitler is called, is forced into tracking down a Jewish woman who, it is suspected, has been kidnapped by the rest of his Nazi cabinet, who have set themselves up as basically a criminal underworld in this alternate world version of England. Part of the joke is that Hitler, as written by Tidhar, maintains the essential features of the classic noir hero—he is incorruptible (if utterly evil), as resistant to the temptations of money and society as was the Marlowe himself. Part of the joke is that our eponymous dreamer is using this fantasy to torture this version of Hitler according to the vulgar traditions of his sub-genre – Hitler is beaten, drugged, tortured, raped several times, urinated upon, and forcibly circumcised, broken down by the cruelties of society until he comes to resemble the broken creatures he created in such numbers.
My first instinct upon reading this book was to wonder, quite simply, how in the name of God Lavie got it published. It as resolutely uncommercial a novel as I have ever read. Far too peculiar for the vast majority of genre readers it is also pulpy and deliberately vulgar in a fashion which seems calculated to likewise annoy more literary types. I also can't possibly imagine the Goy getting anything out of it – it is so distinctly a product of a certain very distinctly Jewish sense of humor, at once lyrical, ironic, and puerile. Readers who persevere through its peculiarities will discover a book which, astonishingly in this day and age, manages to grapple with the moral ramifications of the Holocaust in an original way. It also has a really, really good Eichman joke.
It is an imperfect novel – the footnotes which accompanied my addition are unnecessary, adding a meta layer to an already complex book. They seem to exist only to offer a sort of intellectual cover for the book, to disassociate the author from the material. There are also, anyway you slice it, too many scenes of Hitler erotica. But in a book so idiosyncratic, such excesses must be forgiven. I don’t really know who reads these reviews, and thus I can’t, in good conscience, actually recommend this book to you. The vast majority of people will probably not enjoy it in the slightest. But it doesn't take away from it being a work of authentic merit.
Congratulations, Lavie – you’ve written the last word in alternative reality Nazi fiction. Could we maybe move on to something else now?

[Caroline Mersey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Man Lies Dreaming is a darkly comic alternate history set in the late 1930s, where Hitler never became Chancellor of Germany and was toppled in a coup. Instead, he fled to London where he now works as a down at heel private investigator. As the novel opens, he's been hired by a rich Jewish heiress to track down her missing sister. But this alternative history exists only in the imagination of a pulp crime writer imprisoned in Auschwitz.

As Lavie Tidhar's extensive historical notes to the novel make clear, there is a long tradition of pulp fiction being used by Jewish writers to explore and address issues relating to the Holocaust. Sometimes the approach taken can be shocking, featuring sexual exploitation of Jewish people, but it has a long history in enabling a culture to come to terms with its past. Popular culture is as much a part of that as 'high' culture, and this is explicitly referred to within the novel, in the form of a debate between two Jewish writers, one based on Primo Levi, the other on a pre-eminent writer of pulp fiction.

By fictionalising and transposing real historical characters (as he did in Osama, his novel which includes a series of books about a fictional freedom fighter called Osama bin Laden), Tidhar is able to examine them in isolation from their context. With the trappings of power removed, Hitler becomes a comic figure: all impotent rage and frustrated ambition. A Hitler who is at the mercy of the system rather than in charge of it becomes a figure to be pitied. His hatreds are petty and over the course of the novel his grip on sanity and rationality begins to slowly unravel. The extensive footnotes show that this portrayal has been extensively researched and grounded in contemporary accounts of Hitler's life and formative experiences, lending the book a high level of authenticity. Other senior Nazi figures also feature, often at the fringes of the law: Hess runs a nightclub, Klaus Barbie is involved in people trafficking and Eichmann becomes the puppet of a US Government seeking to overthrow the Communist regimes that have taken over Europe.

It would be tempting to think of A Man Lies Dreaming as Tidhar's Holocaust novel, but it is so much more than that. It has much to say about contemporary society, particularly in how we treat immigrants and minorities. In Tidhar's alternative London, Oswald Mosley is on the verge of becoming Prime Minister. His Blackshirts are a personal paramilitary force, engaged in violent assaults on members of the Jewish community to which the authorities turn a blind eye. .Deliciously, much of Mosley's major political speech in the novel is drawn from genuine UKIP speeches (as Tidhar revealed when I met him at SRFC at the end of April), showing just how little has changed in our attitudes to those who don't conform to a narrow idea of Britishness.

Tidhar pulls off a very tricky balance in this novel. The Auschwitz sequences are written in such a way as to highlight the brutal treatment of the Jewish community. But if we didn't know it was a historical reality, one would be hard-pressed to find it credible that human beings could treat one another in such a way, rendering those sections of the novel more dreamlike and less convincingly real than the alternative London of right-wing bigotry and impoverished refugees.

A Man Lies Dreaming is a difficult and dense novel to read. Some may struggle in particular with the BDSM sex scenes featuring Hitler, however darkly funny they are written (brain bleach is definitely required). But it is a rich and complex work that rewards thoughtful reading and stays with you long after finishing it. It is probably my book of the year so far.

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lardy, sweaty spoilers are soon to appear, be warned.

That big fat oaf Gil Chesterton once said that the criminal is the artist, the detective only the critic....he was wrong. I was an artist, for it is an artist's purpose to make order out of chaos.

A clever aside by Tidhar. One as heavy as his other touches. These are the citations of GKC often used by Žižek . That isn't an accident, nothing in this alternative history is random. By a certain metric that would make A Man Lies Dreaming a success. It didn't work for me -- because the protagonist of this pulp narrative is actually HITLER. The National Socialists lose the 1933 elections in Germany and der presumptive Fuhrer flees the Fatherland and the communists for the foggy alleys of East London and the rise of Oswald Mosley in 1939. There is a numbing need for the author to populate his set pieces with gotcha figures -- from Ian Fleming to Rudolph Hess to all the Mitford sisters: even Hitler is aghast when Mosley selects Eichmann to lead the German government in exile-- who the fuck is that, quips the failed Austrian painter.

Oh shit, I can't go on. Beckett would've groaned at this contrivance. I simply shudder.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

***WARNING: I feel the need to swear in this review, so if you are not up for a few expletives, please move on. Nothing to see here. If you don't mind the sweariness, though ... "Willkommen!" ***

Me: So A Man Lies Dreaming is a giant fucking jackboot to the genitals.
You: What the hell do you mean by that?
Me: Besides the quite literal kicks to the balls and vulvas?
You: What?
Me: Seriously. This book is a cornucopia of genital punishment. Knives, boots, hands, knees, other genitals! If you can imagine a way one's genitals could be harmed, there is a good chance it is here in this book, but beyond the physical, literal jackboots to the genitals, the book itself is just a big metaphorical jackboot to the reader's genitals.
You: Ummm ...
Me: But here's the thing, though, it is fucking impressive. The kicking Lavie Tidhar gives us is seriously brave. It's powerful. If you can stomach it, what he's doing turns out to be rather impressive.
You: What does he do?
Me: The impossible.
You (dubiously): Uh huh
Me: No. Seriously. He makes a protagonist -- a "pseudo-hero" -- out of the most unlikely historical figure, throws him into a pulpy, detective noir, and doesn't even try to temper this fuckhead's nastiness, but still manages, somehow, to make you care about him. Well, maybe not you, but me. He made me care about him, and that was the biggest jackboot to the genitals of all.
You: Who? What historical figure?
Me (waving the question off): But he doesn't stop there. He delivers two insanely graphic BDSM sex scenes, and you can practically smell the piss and shit and naughty fluids. And this is all just in the noir part of the story.
You: There's more?
Me: Fuck yeah. There is a serial killer out killing prostitutes in London, carving an infamous symbol into their chests and killing to express his love for another and a world that never was. There's an assassination plot. There are terror groups. There is a whole literary and cinematic backdrop that feels just like ours but is the slightest touch askew.
You: I --
Me: -- But that's not all. There's this other tale, probably the main tale, of the Man Lying Dreaming. And his story, well that's the tragic one, that's the key to this whole thing, and you would love that story, and that story tells us so much about the other stories, and it is the story that makes this whole thing about imagination and about how we have only the most tenuous grasp on reality, in the way we tell ourselves the stories of everything.
You: I don't think I could even get to that story. This doesn't sound like the book for me.
Me: I think it is a book for everyone.
You: Mmm ... No. Not for me.
Me: You don't look too happy with me.
You: Not really. No.
Me: I shouldn't have told you about this, should I?
You: No. Probably not.
Me: Um ... sorry?
You (shaking head): Too late. I think I gotta go.
Me (watching you walk away / under breath): You're missing out ...

[Xavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

8'5-10
Me sorprende la poca repercusión que ha tenido esta excelente novela.

https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/20...

[Ignacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lavie Tidhar ha hecho un gran trabajo sobre la materia sobre la cual se establecen las ucronías. Recrea una Europa de 1939 donde los nazis no subieron al poder, el partido comunista se hizo con el gobierno y los fascistas que pudieron escapar malviven en un Reino Unido. Sobre este trasfondo sitúa una narración de género criminal: la investigación de un Adolf Hitler transformado en detective privado, contratado para encontrar a una joven judía que ha desaparecido después de escapar desde Alemania. Las características pulp de sus pesquisas, el sexo salvaje y desinhibido, la violencia desatada, le sientan muy bien a esta novela que, con un giro, se convierte en una lúcida reflexión sobre el poder liberador de las historias. Además, en este continuo juego de reflejos entre nuestra historia y esta historia paralela, Tidhar se muestra la mayor parte del tiempo incisivo (los ecos del Reino Unido del Brexit, el carácter inevitable de la Historia). Otras, no tanto (la exploración de la vida de Hitler a ratos me parece un poco forzada).

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis never come to power. Instead they fall, and flee to England, where "Wolf" now works as a noir private detective in an alternate universe.

This is one of the most personally satisfying books it has been my pleasure to read. Petty and noble, well-read and well-reasearched, gorgeously written, and divinely ironic. There is no utopia here, only filth and sin and hate, a hate that drives itself to a moment of justice I can't even be jealous of the author for having written.

This may end up as my favorite read of the year. Highly recommended.

[Silvia Moreno-Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Novel about an alternate 1930s Germany where Hitler is a private detective. But there's another reality where a Jewish man in a concentration camp uses his imagination to escapes the horrors of World War II. Tidhar displays a great knowledge of history, pulp fiction, genre fiction and language. It's a raw, difficult and brilliant work

[Ola G · Rating 2 out of 5]

4.5/10

My full review on my blog.

This book showed up on my radar a few years back, highly recommended. The premise sounded fascinating and unsettling at the same time – a dying prisoner in Auschwitz, a former pulp writer, escapes his reality imagining an alternate history where Hitler never rose to power but instead, following persecution and incarceration in a prisoner camp by victorious communists, escaped to London where he tries to make ends meet as a down-on-his-luck private detective.

When a Jewish femme fatale, Isabella Rubinstein, knocks at his door asking for his help in locating her missing radicalised sister, Adolf, going by the nickname Wolf, wants nothing more than to throw her out. But money is good, and he needs it – and so he accepts the case that leads him back into the middle of ex-Nazi conspiracy. He is forced to meet with people from his past he’d rather avoid – and what an array of historical figures it is, from Hess and Himmler to Goebbels to Mosley; even Ilse Koch makes an appearance. But the case is difficult, former associates reticent, and nothing seems to go well, particularly when Wolf becomes a suspect in a serial killer case: on the street where he has his agency and a room, prostitutes start to turn up dead, with swastikas cut into their bodies and little toy soldiers left next to their corpses.

It may come as a surprise to many, and is, I feel, a testament to Tidhar’s skill, that throughout the crazy pulpy plot Hitler becomes a person perhaps not likeable, but understandable – his obsessions, his constant feeling of superiority that seems like desperation in the face of continuous, constant defeat, his various quirks, insecurities and mishaps, and the obsession with order and righteousness make him almost pitiful, almost worth of compassion; brokenly human. And if that was all there was to Tidhar’s novel, I would have been quite happy indeed. Alas, what none of the reviews I read mentioned, and what I had been unprepared for, was the fact that under the dark noir veil A Man Lies Dreaming is essentially a BDSM revenge Hitler porn in which he is repeatedly beaten up, pissed on, forcibly tied up and penetrated in various ways, and eventually brutally circumcised by the vicious father of one of the clients. I would not want to read any of it about Hitler, and I would not want to read any of it about anyone. Not my type of literature.

[...]

I found the novel provocative and repellent at the same time. A bit like a dirty open wound that you constantly prod with your finger and can’t turn away from looking. It’s a challenge, scatologically juvenile and endearingly daring, and not bereft of some merit, as yet another generation’s attempt to come to terms with Holocaust. So, I would say, read at your own risk. You’ve been warned 🙂

[Miquel Codony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno no puede menos que quitarse el sombrero ante el hallazgo que supone este “A Man Lies Dreaming” de Lavie Tidhar. Sus virtudes son numerosas, la inteligencia que anima a la novela grande y malintencionada y, por si fuera poco, está impregnada de un negrísimo sentido del humor que no hace más que resaltar un trasfondo tanto más valioso en cuanto se trata de un libro sumamente entretenido que ya valdría la pena leer sólo por el buen rato que proporciona. Se trata, además, de una ucronía excepcional que consigue construir en su protagonista uno de los mejores ejemplos de antihéroe que he tenido el placer de leer.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is based in 2 parts , the first part is when Shomer is awake and he is in Auschwitz, but while he is dreaming he dreams of an alternative world where Hitler is known as Mr wolf and is a PI in London. I do like the alternative history part of this novel and is like a pulp fiction novel

[Benjanun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is alternate history, imagining Adolf Hitler as an impoverished private investigator - stripped of his power, forced to live on little money in London.

The framing narrative is thus: a Jewish man, dying in a concentration camp, comforts himself by imagining Hitler as the above. We have two layers running side by side: the inhuman brutality of the camp and alternative Hitler (alias Wolf) investigating a missing person case in London. It's a risky, ambitious idea of course - not many writers can successfully pull off writing Hitler as a protagonist. There's always the risk of making him sympathetic (and so being really, really deeply offensive) or sanitizing him (again, offensive and ahistorical). Tidhar, though, is an exceptional talent. He pulls off the feat of making Wolf an engaging character that we are, at the same time, very much meant to loathe.

This is a book where a Jewish woman literally pisses on Hitler and calls him a whore.

It's incredibly politically subversive, and extremely - unflinchingly - in its explicitness, in both the framing story and the imagined life of Hitler-as-PI. Of course there are times when Wolf/Hitler faces off against antagonists that make him look slightly less repugnant in comparison, but it's a matter of power: they are often his former subordinates and allies, and retain the power to exercise monstrosity, whereas he is stripped of everything and must toil away in poverty. Not infrequently he's beaten within an inch of his life, and there's a voyeuristic satisfaction in that even though usually we are supposed to feel bad for the noir detective being 'unfairly' beaten up. But here it is simultaneously monster against monster, and - from the viewpoint of real-world history, the viewpoint of the Jewish writer imagining all this - supreme justice.

It absolutely is a book like no other. Please don't miss it.

[Odo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5.0

[Antonio Diaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adictiva, genial pero estremecedora. Una novela que no deja indiferente. Pronto reseña en Sense Of Wonder

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You know who I am?"
"I know who you were...."

This novel really shouldn't work, but it does. Imagine a world in which, instead of rising to power, Hitler and the Nazi's suffer 'The Fall,' in which communism takes control in Germany. This leaves the Nazi elite scattered, suffering the status of immigrant refugees; many in England, where Mosley is having the success as a fascist leader that eluded Hitler.

It is London, 1939 and Hitler is now known as 'Herr Wolf,' a down and out private detective in Soho. He is employed by a wealthy, Jewish woman, to find her sister, who was using an underground route to come to the safety of London but never arrived. This leads Wolf into an investigation which involves many of his old comrades, now doing very nicely in London, thank you very much.

There are many cameos in this novel, who range from Oswald Mosley, Diana and Unity Mitford, Josef Goebbels and Magda, Klaus Barbie, Leni Riefenstahl, Rudolf Hess and even Tolkien puts in an appearance, alongside Evelyn Waugh and Leslie Charteris, at a literary party. Wolf is much as you would imagine him - aside from the fact that so many women seem to wish to sleep with him, which stretches the imagination more than a little!

Meanwhile, in Auschwitz, a writer of pulp fiction dreams up the plot, so we have a book within a book. Our author will put Herr Wolf in some very sticky situations and have him beaten up, abused and threatened on a virtually constant basis. Not always a pleasant read, but a very original idea and, strangely, you can see the whining, complaining, self-important, former Fuhrer, demanding his due and sneering at the success of others as he deludes himself that he is acting with more credibility than his former associates.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no doubt that this will be one of the top books I read in 2014. A man lies dreaming is like no other book I have ever read. That is not a casual statement. It certainly shares traits with, among others, Lavie Tidhar's previous work, as well as Philip K Dick, and dare I say George MacDonald Fraser among a host of others. AMLD is a gutsy book. It shows an author who is willing to take chances, and enjoys more than a healthy dose of irony among other traits. I wish I could come up with some catchy blurb that would make you take notice of this book. It succeeds on so many levels.

This novel is definitely not afraid to challenge any conventions.

[Karl]

COVER ART: Pedro Marques
PAGES A Man Lies Dreaming - 348 / Lust of the Swastika - 88

"A MAN LIES DREAMING" including the previously unpublished novella LUST OF THE SWASTIKA plus bonus material.

Limited to 200 numbered Slipcased Jacketed Hardcovers signed by Lavie Tidhar

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really more like a 4.5, though I have more reservations than that score would typically indicate.

Plenty has been said about the plot, so I won't bother recounting it. Yep, Hitler. Yep, kinda funny! Yep, very uncomfortable at times. But what I didn't expect was how uncomfortable it made me to see Hitler abused, the way he's abused in this book. Of course, that sort of vengeful, smirking abuse is in part justified by the frame story, which implies that this Hitler and his many indignities are dreamed up by a Jewish pulp fiction writer in Auschwitz. But on the other hand, it's hard not to imagine Tidhar's glee as he repeatedly writes scenes of torture, sexual abuse, and more. On yet another hand, that glee (if it actually exists) isn't exactly unearned, as the afterword makes clear.

This is a rare book for sure—one that effectively puts you inside the mind of a monster, lets you get a little comfortable there, then makes you intensely uncomfortable with what happens to the monster, while still clearly condemning him. It also, rather pointedly, reflects our present-day political failings and the ease with which we forget the horrors of the past.

As for the book AS a book, it's beautifully written, evoking the feel and pacing of noir classics while operating on a linguistic level above all but the best of them. It's the first of Tidhar's novels that I've read, but it certainly won't be the last.

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most disturbing story I've read all year. The Holocaust needs new perspectives in order for its pain and its warning to remain fresh in people's minds, and this novel is probably the most interesting Holocaust story I've read in the last 5 years.

[Paul Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.





As Tidhar's novel opens it seems to be an alternative history. We are in London in November 1939, but Europe is not at war. In this timeline, the Communist part took power in Germany in the early 1930s leading to disruption and many refugees fleeing to Britain, where Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists appears on course to win the election fuelled by anti-immigrant, -communist and -Jewish rhetoric.





One of these refugees is a man calling himself Wolf, who is working as a low-rent private eye. He hates the whores who work in the alleys near his office/apartment, he hates the kindly old Jewish baker who rents him the room, he is constantly bitter about The Fall, as the collapse of Germany is referred to and, especially, about how close he himself came to power. In best noir style, events are instigated by the arrival of a beautiful (Jewish) heiress at Wolf's office.





The tale switches between Wolf's journal - where we get his observations and thoughts, often distasteful, sometimes humanising as he remembers the past events that shaped him - as well as the observations of someone who refers to himself as the Watcher, clearly a disturbed individual even before he takes action, some third person narration - and the reveal that the story of Wolf is being told inside the head of Shomer, a Jewish pulp fiction author as he endures the horrors of Auschwitz.





Tidhar masterfully weaves a fine noir detective story, made powerful by the frame and characters. The description of Wolf losing his temper and shouting and spitting in rage would be enough to tell us who he is, even were we not given other clues. In his investigations, he looks up his former associates - notably Goebbels and Hess, both having "sold out" - but we also see Ilse Koch, Klaus Barbie and Josef Kramer. Along with Mosley we meet his wife Diana and her sister, Unity, both fervent Nazis. Wolf bumps into Leni Riefenstahl, now an up-and-coming Hollywood actress (this giving us one of several surprisingly funny scenes, where Leni tells him she is filming a sequel to The Great Gatsby where Gatsby (played by Humphrey Bogart) had become a gun runner before retiring to run a bar in Tangier where she, playing Daisy Buchanan, finds him, before the scene ends with Leni, tearfully, saying "We'll always have Nuremberg, won't we, Wolf?")





Shomer, in his mind, puts Wolf through many humiliations and degradations but is unable to avoid giving his character humanity, for all the seething bigotry that drives Wolf's hatred and violence.





I don't tend to read fiction about the Holocaust; I know the details, I've read and seen much non-fiction, as well as the great Primo Levi and don't feel the need to descend into that place again, but in embedding the story in this way Lavie Tidhar casts light on those events, and on the experience the refugee and the foreigner and the other, as well as the perpetrators. (To be clear, I am not feeling in the slightest forgiving of or sympathetic to Hitler, or the others, but the character of Wolf in this novel goes through a journey that might just allow a measure of redemption). The rise of Mosley and the crowds that welcome him with anti-Semitic chants also draws a parallel with the return of the far right in our own time - although it was published in 2014, I couldn't help but see echoes of the events of Charlottesville in 2017 and those "very fine people on both sides".





A Man Lies Dreaming is a stunning novel that has left me shaken and moved, and will stay with me for a very long time indeed.

[Pablo Mallorquí · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tengo sentimientos encontrados con Un hombre sueña despierto. Por una parte ha sido una lectura muy amena, que se lee sin altibajos y cuyo estilo capta la atención del lector, alternando narradores en primera y tercera persona y haciendo uso de los recursos de la novela negra más pulp. Además, la premisa es brutal, con una ucronía en un Londres alternativo donde Adolf Hitler malvive como detective tras haber fracasado su asalto al poder en Alemania, que tiene un régimen comunista. Todos estos detalles unidos a multitudes de huevos de pascua históricos y escenas escabrosas que llaman poderosamente la atención hacían que esta lectura me tuviese que maravillar.

Sin embargo, no ha sido así. La trama de novela negra, a pesar de ser el hilo del libro, acaba siendo anecdótica en favor de poner al protagonista en un sinfín de putadas que al principio se leen como justicia divina pero acaban siendo pesadas. A nivel especulativo, la ucronía tampoco alza el vuelo y se contenta con situar a actores más o menos importantes del régimen nazi en papeles rocambolescos de este Londres alternativo. Y aunque el final es satisfactorio, al acabar lo que se te queda es esa fijación de Tidhar con la escatología, que por su frecuencia provoca más hilaridad que repugnancia.

[Mieneke · Rating 5 out of 5]

After 2013’s wonderful The Violent Century , which I loved, I couldn’t wait to read Lavie Tidhar’s 2014 release A Man Lies Dreaming. Luckily I was in London the week after it was released, so I got to pick up a copy soon after release. And I’m glad I sprung for the hardback version as it’s a beautiful book, physically speaking. The cover is deceptively simple yet very powerful and evocative and is not a dust cover, but has laminated boards, in other words it’s printed directly on the boards. The novel contained within the covers is perhaps not so much beautiful as it is compelling. A Man Lies Dreaming isn’t an easy book to read, at least not for me, but it was absolutely engrossing.

What made book so hard to read, you might wonder? Its protagonist Mr Wolf, a.k.a. Hitler, is the book’s main character and for large sections its narrator as well and this made for a complicated reading experience. From childhood, I've been taught that Hitler and his ideologies embody all that is evil. There is no grey area there, Hitler equals evil. So for a book to have its protagonist be an alternate history Hitler, one that still believes everything the real Hitler believed, who is unpleasant, anti-Semitic, arrogant, suffers from a superiority complex, and is just in general a bit off, is a risk and is hard to pull off. Because, how can the reader relate to such a protagonist and read an entire book that focuses on such an unsympathetic and hateful character? In Lavie Tidhar's case by giving the reader a different character to focus her sympathies on – in the person of Shomer – and by making the mystery plot become ostensibly the core of the narrative. Almost every time I got too uncomfortable with Wolf's slurs, anti-semitism, and general misanthropy, Tidhar managed to just shift the narrative to Shomer or to create a diversion through a break in the case. In that aspect – and more generally – the book was impeccably paced.

The book has a strong Noir sensibility, reminiscent of Chandler and Hammett. As Shomer is a writer of shund – Yiddish pulp fiction; shund means trash in Yiddish – this isn't really surprising. You can find the usual dames and mobsters in the narrative and Wolf is your typical, hard-boiled gum shoe, apart from being who he is, of course. The mobsters pitted against each other are Jewish and Nazi’s. Many of the Nazi leaders have escaped now-Communist Germany and moved into the London underworld, using their old contacts to smuggle goods and people out of Germany. Only Wolf seems to have stayed on the right side of the law and even he isn’t much respected by the policemen he encounters. In fact, British politics are in upheaval because the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley looks set to win the upcoming elections. Mosley’s ideas have gained traction in this alternate Britain and the Brits are becoming more and more resistant to immigrants and Jews. Additionally, political forces within the UK and the US are gearing up to take on the Red Scare now it has gained such solid footing in Germany.

Tidhar heaps layers upon layers of meaning; the exploration of revenge and most importantly redemption, the interesting ‘what if’ of whether the Second World War would have still happened if Hitler had lost the election to the communists in 1932, and the tragedy of Shomer’s story. But what stood out to me most, was the way that the commentary on what happened in the fictional then is valid for what is happening now. We are once again living in a world were there is a big opponent to unify against, though rather than the communists it’s Islamic extremists, and politicians once again are using popular dissatisfaction with their circumstances and their fear of a large conflict to whip up hate, fear and discrimination. There is Farage in the UK and Wilders here in the Netherlands, both of them loudly vilifying immigrants and wanting to close borders. Tidhar shows us two possible ways of how this might work out, directly in the case of Wolf’s alternate world, indirectly through Shomer’s framing narrative. Let’s hope that in our reality we will find a third, better way.

A Man Lies Dreaming is a fascinating narrative. It has left me wondering about Tidhar’s award-winning novel Osama and whether and if so how there are many thematic similarities between these two and if so, which ones. I guess this means I’ll have to scare myself up a copy of that one too. In the meantime, A Man Lies Dreaming is a must-read for anyone that likes books that make them think; it is complex, with plenty of meaty themes to mull over. I hope this book gets the critical acclaim and awards attention it so very much deserves.

[Angus Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the good fortune to hang out with Lavie Tidhar in Summer 2017 at Polcon, a convention in Lublin, Poland where we were guest foreign authors. The moment we met (actually we’d met a week before at a publisher’s party in London, but he’d forgotten) Lavie harangued me for pronouncing his name incorrectly. (The correct pronunciation, in case you’re wondering, is “Lavvy” like the abbreviation of lavatory and Ta-dah!!, like a man pulling a rabbit from a hat)
Lavie was intriguing company over the next few days, not least late one night outside a bar when a drunk man marched up to our table proffering big bony fists and explaining that he hated the English, so was going to attack us. I tried to diffuse him with soothing words and pictures of my children. However, every time our attacker deflated, Lavie goaded the man anew – yes the English are dreadful and this man is the worst of them - and we were back to the beginning.
So it was no surprise that this book is intelligent, weird and peppered with lavish bouts of sadomasochism.
And it is a great book. Tidhar has beautifully and skilfully created a wonderful story interwoven with comedy, tragedy and disgusting sex. A less astute reviewer might conclude that Tidhar is obsessed with strong women humiliating weaker men and the smell of semen, but that would be making the age old mistake of confusing characters’ characters with the writer’s.
The only way to write about the holocaust successfully is to come at it obliquely - see Martin Amis’ Times Arrow, Art Spiegelman’s Maus and many others. Lavie approaches the inconceivable horror of the holocaust through a maze, walking backwards, then, turning round with a smile, punches you in the gut with it.
It really is a great book. Read it.

[Alex MacFarlane · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Auschwitz, shund-writer Shomer imagines a final pulp narrative: an alternate late 1930s Britain where the infamous Wolf is a down-on-his-luck PI. (I’ve got to say, as ‘unexpectedly fucking genius’ ideas go, this is up there...) That narrative is the majority of the book, but Auschwitz is never far, and it is more than a frame. The set-up allows a dialogue between the two realities: the rather obvious notions of ‘revenge fantasy’ and ‘wish-fulfilment’ colour Shomer’s imagined alternate Britain, but it is more complicated than that. Pulp tropes abound. Other unpleasant realities take hold: it is not possible, I suspect, to imagine a late 1930s Europe that saw the rise of extremism without seeing that extremism carried through to some extent. The rise of Mosley’s British fascists in the alternate history is especially chilling for a British reader today. In Auschwitz, prisoners debate how to write about the Holocaust. The whole book asks: how do you write about Hitler?

It is not the lightest of reads, or, ah, a book I could have bought for my father (I learnt a little more about Hitler’s sex life than I ever expected and wanted to) but it is definitely an interesting book, in the least I-have-nothing-else-to-say-so-I’ll-call-it-interesting way possible. It is deliciously meta, in that it’s aware of what it’s doing, in dialogue with itself, and I’m really into that at the moment. I’m still thinking about it a couple of months later.

[Alistair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how to rate this one? Definitely 4+ but maybe more?
Alternative history with a dark/adult flavour.
It is 1939-ish a writer of Yiddish pulp is in Auschwitz dreaming a 'noir detective' story.
Imagining an alternative reality nearly as dark and twisted as the one he is living.