How does one portray the horrors of history in a way that captures the unspeakable reality of it whilst avoiding reproducing those horrendous images to the point where they become simply the cliché of a thousand Oscar-winning films, important snapshots of history numbly devoid of the very human revulsion and horror we should feel at this ghastly mechanised mass-extermination of human life? Tidhar’s answer is to turn to pulp fiction.
#Lunacy commission how to
Tidhar is the descendent of survivors from Auschwitz, so the question of how to write about the horrors of the Holocaust is a personal part of his Jewish heritage. But perhaps the benefit of hindsight will convince more people that Tidhar truly is one of the key literary voices of the modern age. It’s hard not to read A Man Lies Dreaming as a frighteningly prescient warning about our complacency in the face of this populist nationalism and the horrible places it would inevitably lead. The novel was written considerably before MAGA and Brexit, yet Tidhar’s book is as much about the rise of a pernicious, British strain of fascism that anticipated these populist nationalist movements. Rereading Tidhar’s masterpiece now is a very different experience. Simultaneously, JABberwocky Literary Agency have collected the linked short stories that Tidhar has written since the publication of the original book into a single volume, The Lunacy Commission, which acts as a companion volume to the novel proper. Flash forward seven years, and in 2021 A Man Lies Dreaming is being reissued by Head Of Zeus, hopefully to bring it to a whole new audience. The novel received a handful of enthusiastic reviews and won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, but never quite tipped over into having the mainstream respect and attention it so clearly deserved.
As a fan of Tidhar’s work I was lucky enough to read it at the time, and was immediately struck with what a powerful and disorienting work of fiction this was, a book that uses speculative fiction and alternate history as a way of talking about the Holocaust, a way of saying the unsayable and making its horror visceral and sharply felt.
Lavie Tidhar’s masterful A Man Lies Dreaming originally came out in 2014 with Hodder & Stoughton. But to answer your question, to write of this Holocaust is to shout and scream, to tear and spit, let words fall like bloodied rain on the page not with cold detachment but with fire and pain, in the language of shund, the language of shit and piss and puke, of pulp, a language of torrid covers and lurid emotions, of fantasy: this is an alien planet, Levi. That world is dead, everything is divided, Before-Auschwitz and the Now, for there is only now, even to think of a life beyond is to indulge in fantasy. “But there you are wrong, for this is no longer the world you knew, the world any of us knew.
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