Dreaming of Hitler [Paperback]

Daphne Merkin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0156006111 | ISBN-13: 978-0156006118 | Publication Date: January 29, 1999

“Lush and uncensored” essays (Village Voice) on spanking during sex, shopping, Martin Scorcese, Israel, breast reduction, Gary Gilmore, depression, and other matters, by “one of the few contemporary essayists who have (and deserve) a following” (New York). “Everything Daphne Merkin writes is so smart, it shines” (Washington Post Book World).

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

"If there is any overriding theme to this collection, I would say that it is one of exposure, pulling or coaxing out of the closet some of the many skeletons we habitually shove inside it." From confessing to the sexual pleasures of spanking ("Spanking: A Romance") to probing Jewish self-loathing in the shadow of the Holocaust ("Dreaming of Hitler: A Memoir of Self-Hatred"), essayist and novelist Merkin (Enchantment, LJ 8/96) dares to ferret out "what's going on under the [polite] surface." These reviews, profiles, and articles, previously published in such publications as The New Yorker, Tikkun, and Allure, are provocative in their subject matter, witty and graceful in their prose style. Great fun to read, they are also insightful and thought-provoking. There are a few misses here (the fluff piece on Donna Karan), but these are more than compensated by such stimulating essays as "A Complicated Friendship: Remembering Diana Trilling." Highly recommended for all collections.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Merkin is blessed with the twin gifts of candor and restraint and with a supple prose style. She also possesses genuine chutzpah, bravely tackling extremely sensitive and complex issues associated with the arbitrariness and ambiguity of these fin-de-millennium times. An adept and intrepid interpreter of culture, Merkin writes about writers (Norman Mailer, Anne Sexton, the "Claire Bloom vs. Philip Roth" debacle), movies (Richard Burton and Martin Scorsese), fashion and body image, and how the media makes the private public in the wake of tragedy. Merkin moves into even more thickety and elusive subjects as she ponders the pervasiveness of ambivalence, the intractability of sexual desire (Merkin's essay on spanking caused quite a stir when it was first published in a different form in the New Yorker), depression, the precariousness of marriage, and the curious self-loathing being Jewish in these post-Holocaust years can entail. Merkin's concentrated essays travel through the mind like meteors burning through the atmosphere: they give off a dazzling amount of illumination and heat. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (January 29, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156006111
• ISBN-13: 978-0156006118
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,311,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth a try if you're in the right mood., December 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreaming of Hitler: Passions and Provocations (Hardcover)

Like most collections of personal essays, this is a mixed bag. Daphne Merkin is an acquired taste, a writer one either enjoys or hates, and all the other contrarian cliches. She writes well, though her style can suggest the word processor a bit too much. It is susceptible to the clots of over-felicity that make one nostalgic for a time when writing was more physical work. For instance, she praises her friend Ida Fink for writing "scrupulously unsentimental" stories, a pleasing phrase until one gets to wondering what a scrupulously sentimental story might be. But she is never less than readable and can turn some very handsome sentences. Her subject matter is more apt to be controversial than her writing skill. Merkin is best known for an article on her long fascination with sexual spanking, and one's opinion of this article is likely to color one's impressions of the book as a whole. I wasn't one of the people who thought that it was either the beginning or the end of Western civilization; although it made me curious while I was reading it, I was surprised at how little it stayed with me afterward. For all the spanking fantasies, Merkin's everyday concerns are quite normal. She loves her daughter, worries about getting fat, refuses to go to class reunions, obsesses about lost belongings, is tempted to steal overpriced trinkets in department stores, and gets crushes on rock stars. Heavens to Murgatroyd. (One or two women's-magazine-style essays could have been cut out and replaced with more of Merkin's interesting book reviews.)But what saves Merkin from banality is the absence of a sense of entitlement to accompany the late-capitalist introspection. She can actually sound much like a feminist Andrei Codrescu; although she takes an interest in sleaze of all kinds, she has a European impatience with self-pity, witness her hatchet job on Claire Bloom and Philip Roth. Merkin is a first-generation American and was raised Orthodox in a family of six children. Her musings on her Jewishness are often enriched with a real sense of danger: the arguments over a Jewish-American's authenticity in claiming the haunted European psychology are hard to separate from those over her right to relax into the Anglo-American standard of living without the associated guilt. (This may be the kind of book Margaret Atwood doesn't like.) Merkin does not apologize for living on this fault line. It inspires her most intelligent and also her most self-indulgent writing, as in the title essay. One can respect Daphne Merkin a lot for her "If anyone takes a spill, it'll be me" attitude to disclosure. Maybe she should get out a bit more, after all.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Among the best in Women's Autobiography, October 11, 2001

By 

Older Mom - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dreaming of Hitler: Passions and Provocations (Hardcover)

Merkin is to be admired for her wit, honesty, and refined ability to soul-search. The best essays are those that concern her life experiences--those focussing on a particular movie or a book are interesting, but not as involving, as her stellar ability to confess and to comprehend what she confesses. Like all very good writers, her honesty hits a nerve, and it was interesting, and saddening to me to see the irritation of a few shocked readers on Amazon. A Freudian would say she'd undone their repressions. But that's often the price of being an honest writer.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Guts and Genius, January 11, 2002

By 

Kevin S. Schemerholtz (Sunny Oakland, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreaming of Hitler (Paperback)

Ms. Merkin dares to bare her soul and takes on a lot of PC thinking. How is this "anti-woman"? In fact, she is shows us the sort of courage and bravery that makes a good feminist!

Part of the issue revolves around the fact that she openly discusses fetishes and sexual identity issues that the PC feminists wish didn't exist. In their vain attempts to crush her into shame and silence, they reveal themselves to be no better than their twisted twins on the right.

As for Ms. Merkin: You go girl!