A review by jasonfurman
A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

5.0

One of the best books so far this year, A Man Lies Dreaming by Israeli science fiction novelist Lavie Tidhar intersperses the story of "Wolf" (aka Adolf Hitler), a down on his private detective in London in 1939--an exile after the communists beat the Nazis in the 1933 elections--with a pulp fiction writer in Auschwitz who is fantasizing about an alternative history that is the Wolf story. The 1939 story is both an homage to hard boiled pulp as Wolf works two cases simultaneously--finding a missing Jewish girl and tracking down a conspiracy to murder the fascist British candidate for Prime Minister--while he is dogged by the police for a series of murders of prostitutes. The Auschwitz story is much shorter and is a brutal description of the concentration camp but also of the attempts to escape it with narration. And the two merge into each other as, for example, Wolf is tortured in the 1939 alternative history in ways that reflect the wish fulfillment of the concentration camp inmate. Wonderfully written, well plotted, moving, and a new perspective on the holocaust novel.