A Man Lies Dreaming

Written by Lavie Tidhar

Narrated by Andrew Wincott

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette UK Audio
• Release date: Oct 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781444762952

Reviews for A Man Lies Dreaming

[markm2315 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This might be good the way that Henry Miller might be good, or the way that Andrew Dice Clay might be funny, but sadomasochistic Holocaust revenge porn is not for me, even if it shows some cleverness in its design, is self-referential, and has footnotes.

[schant-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't really know what to make of this one. It starts as an alt_hist, where the Communists won the elections in Germany in 1933 and rounded up the Nazis into internment camps. a few of them escape to England and become small-time gangsters, thugs, people-traffickers, or end up on the fringes of Moseley's resurgent Blackshirts. All except for Hitler, who works as a private eye under the name of Wolf, because he thinks he's better than all his old, degraded comrades and is standing up for justice. There is a lot of violence, anti-semitism, misogyny, and sado-masochistic sex. It's totally sordid.Then there are other passages apparently from out timeline where a Jewish man is trying to survive in Auschwitz. He used to write pulp fiction so presumably he's the man "dreaming" the alternate timeline, but it's hard to be sure.It's an unpleasant story, but I felt compelled to read to the end to find out what happened, so I guess it worked.

[datrappert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An utterly compelling, frightening, lurid, and unique story taking place in an alternate 1939 London, where Adolf Hitler, going by the name Wolf, is working as a Chandleresque private eye after escaping from a Germany where Communists won the 1933 election. Tidhar's book works on so many levels--as a holocaust story (the man who lies dreaming); a violent and twisted detective story; an alternate history where Oswald Mosley's fascists win the 1939 election and Britain takes a turn to the far right (and Tidhar has a wonderful hallucinogenic paragraph where the Shard, the London Eye, and other landmarks of the future are briefly seen but are understood not to exist in the disastrous timeline of Mosley as PM); and maybe even premonitions of Brexit. Tidhar's prose is powerful and sometimes poetic. This novel stands with the two ones I have read before--Osama and Unholy Land--as an amazing triumph of an author's imagination, but it is probably easier to digest than those two, and with its links to a history more known to most of us, it manages to not only entertain and disgust, but also to move us and even amuse us a few times. Wolf is not mean to be sympathetic, but even he is capable of a few honest insights along the way to the novel's unpredictable conclusion. Brilliant--just read it.

[jonfaith · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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 pulp narrative is 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.

[krupskaja · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought it would be science fiction, and I was disappointed. The book was well written, but I didn't get anything out of it. Yes Adolf Hitler was humiliated, and turned into a jew and that's nice, but it wasn't enough to fill up a full novel.

[stephengoldenberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

After the disappointment of Martin Amis' Zone of Interest, I vowed not to read any more holocaust novels but I made an exception for this one as it sounded intriguing. Shomer, an inmate of Auschwitz and an ex- pulp fiction novelist, distracts himself from the horrors of the concentration camp by imagining a pulp crime novel in which Adolf Hitler (aka Wolf) has been ousted from power by the communists and fled to London where he becomes a private investigator.
All the familiar tropes of Raymond Chandler novels are skilfully reproduced including frequent violence and depraved sex. All the other leading Nazis make cameo appearances as does Oswald Moseley and the British blackshirts. There's the occasional use of humour and parody e.g. Lenin Riefenstahl, the Nazi documentary maker and actress is involved in a Hollywood film which sounds very like Casablanca.
The problem is that it's hard to seeAdolph Hitler as Philip Marlowe and it seems at times as if we may even be expected to sympathise with him. Wolf's (Hitler's) trajectory in the novel is from being a Jew-hater to accidentally becoming a Jew (including being violently circumcised).
It's a very readable novel but I'm not at all clear what the point of it is.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Nazis were ousted by the Communists in the early 1930s, and now Hitler is scratching a living in London, under the name Wolf, as a private eye. There’s something about the conceit that doesn’t really work – whether it’s Hitler downtrodden in London, or just a Chandleresque PI in 1930s London – but Tidhar nonetheless makes it work. Though Wolf is by definition a nasty piece of work, it’s hard not to sympathise with him as he’s beaten and attacked by all and sundry, even those you’d expect to be on his side. While presented as pulp, Wolf’s narrative is really an excellent black comedy – it uses the language of the former, deliberately spoofing Chandler and Hammet in several places, but it is its shape which identifies it as black comedy. Even those characters whose sensibilities align with Wolf’s turn on him, and eventually the biggest irony of all lands him on a ship emigrating to Palestine under a Jewish name. The title of the novel, however, refers to the other narrative in the book, about a prisoner at Auschwitz, who used to write shund, or Yiddish pulp fiction. Wolf is his invention. Comparisons with Osama are inevitable as both books posit a real-world villain occupying the role of a pulp fiction hero in an invented universe. On finishing A Man Lies Dreaming, I’d have said the earlier novel was the better, but as I came to write this quick review I decided I preferred this one. A Man Lies Dreaming is an effortless read, and Wolf is an excellent fictional creation. It’s easy to overlook how cleverly done it is. Which is a shame.

[nwhyte-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this. Rather than a "Hitler Wins" alternate timeline, this is "Hitler loses early", with the failed Führer earning a living as a private detective in London, in the run-up to Mosley's 1940 election victory. I suspect on reflection that I will decide that it was trying to be a bit too clever, but recommend it in the meantime. Would like to hear others' views.