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yaelm's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
לא לגמרי בטוחה איך לדרג את הספר הזה, יכול להיות שזה עוד ישתנה. מצד אחד פרמיס ממש מעניין שנשמע כמו פרומפט מוזר במיוחד לפרויקט הפאנפיקים של ״ספרים?״ (בקטע הכי טוב), מצד שני קשוח בטירוף מבחינת התייחסות לכל פגיעה גופנית, מינית, זנות, התעללות פיזית מאוד מפורטת, פדופיליה וכמובן החוט המקשר - שואה וגזענות.
לא הצלחתי להפסיק לקרוא אותו, אבל הלוואי שהייתי יודעת כמה קשוח הוא הולך להיות ולהכין את עצמי כי הגעתי לחלוטין לא ב-mindset הנכון.
הוא גרם לי להרגיש את כל הרגשות (כולל הרבה כעס) אבל זה בסדר, ספרים הם ככה לפעמים והוא באמת כתוב מצוין.
לא אהבתי את העיסוק ב-bdsm כסוג של קינק שיימינג. זה לא באמת קינק שיימינג כמו ש… המספר הוא המספר ומן הסתם אין בו שום דבר טוב, אז כל דבר שהוא עושה נתפס כרע. לא יודעת, הכל קשוח.
לא הצלחתי להפסיק לקרוא אותו, אבל הלוואי שהייתי יודעת כמה קשוח הוא הולך להיות ולהכין את עצמי כי הגעתי לחלוטין לא ב-mindset הנכון.
הוא גרם לי להרגיש את כל הרגשות (כולל הרבה כעס) אבל זה בסדר, ספרים הם ככה לפעמים והוא באמת כתוב מצוין.
לא אהבתי את העיסוק ב-bdsm כסוג של קינק שיימינג. זה לא באמת קינק שיימינג כמו ש… המספר הוא המספר ומן הסתם אין בו שום דבר טוב, אז כל דבר שהוא עושה נתפס כרע. לא יודעת, הכל קשוח.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gore, Hate crime, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Torture, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Excrement, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Death of parent, Murder, War, and Injury/Injury detail
danlewisfw's review against another edition
5.0
This book was hard to wrap my mind around, its an alternate history book where Hitler failed to get power and had to flee to London and became a PI (that is evident from the start of the book BTW so no spoiler) but its also a Dashiell Hammett type of hard boiled detective. As I read this I had a Maltese falcon like moving running in my head with Peter Lorre as Hitler. If you are a fan of hard boiled detective stories this will be right up your alley with a decidedly dark side to it. Its like he channeled Dashiell Hammett it was impressive. This is probably the most unique book I have ever read.
#amanliesdreaming
Update: two months latter and this book is still in my head. Bravo!
#amanliesdreaming
Update: two months latter and this book is still in my head. Bravo!
pauldaly's review against another edition
4.0
A noir fantasy, an alternative history, a dark thought experiment, but most of all this is literary bomb throwing of the highest order, designed to shift people out of their comfort zones. If you can deal with Hitler as Phillip Marlowe, Auchwitz as a dark magical realist Catskills resort, and some truly anything-but-erotic s&m episodes, then have at it. They are just some of the clues to why this novel was greeted with almost equal parts praise and revulsion. For my part, they are not mutually exclusive- admiration for a truly fine piece of invention which for all of its novel ways of looking at the Fascist 1930s never lets us forget the actual history reads like some fantastical magical realist horror story.
deadwolfbones's review against another edition
4.0
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.
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.
greycloud's review against another edition
2.0
La nota es baja no porque el libro esté mal, sino sencillamente porque no me ha gustado la historia.
pezski's review against another edition
5.0
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.
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.
katbond's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to like this more than I did. But, I'm not sure what the point was.
I did enjoy all of the references to actual persons, working them into the tapestry. I had actually been betting on Speer as the mastermind so the fact that he wasn't was a twist.
I did enjoy all of the references to actual persons, working them into the tapestry. I had actually been betting on Speer as the mastermind so the fact that he wasn't was a twist.
abookishtype's review against another edition
4.0
Perhaps it’s fitting that I read Hannah Tennant-Moore’ essay in The Paris Review about the merits of reading literature that disgusts and repulses us. Her words helped me through Lavie Tidhar’s disturbing work, A Man Lies Dreaming. The other thing that helped me through the scenes of, for lack of a better term, unorthodox sexuality and depictions of anti-Semitism was Tidhar’s virtuosity with ideas and genre. Not every reader will make it through this book, but those who do will be rewarded with a meditation on story and reality that will haunt for a very long time...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.
piccoline's review
3.0
This works way better than it should. I can't really elaborate without spoilers, though. Let's just say it's a shockingly messed-up fresh take on dealing with the Holocaust, in part by weaving a Hammett-esque private dick story all through it.
But that really only scratches the surface of the bizarre places this tale takes you.
Let's leave it at this: if you read it, don't blame me. But if you read it, for goodness' sake, let's talk about it.
But that really only scratches the surface of the bizarre places this tale takes you.
Let's leave it at this: if you read it, don't blame me. But if you read it, for goodness' sake, let's talk about it.