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2.0 out of 5 stars
The Dice Man,
This review is from: Dice Man (Paperback)
This is a story about a psychiatrist, who in order to break the stifling tedium in his life decides to live and act as dictated by the outcome of dice he casts. The premise is intriguing and promising, and implies the presence of courage, adventure as well as a certain predilection for fatalism. Moreover, the whole concept infuses the reader with some apprehension and shock at the thought of letting an external force ordain one's fate and actions. By following this new course in life, the psychiatrist's existing life disintegrates and a new one emerges. He uses dice in his treatment of patients and the reader sees the parody of how this highly unorthodox method of treatment is no less successful than the classical psychoanalysis.The plot loses its appeal half way through the book after one realizes that decisions made based on the numbers shown by dice do not offer sought solutions to life's problems or lack of lustre. The pleasures derived are still short-lived, and they strengthen instead of weaken one's ego and its constant cravings for new stimulants. Moreover, the actions the main protagonist associates with the specific outcomes of dice are not linked to any contribution to the good in the world, but rather to the egoistic fulfillment of one's own desires and base insticts such as his propensity toward extensive sexual experimentation. The book did not meet my expectations, and I would never put it in the category of books that could potentially make a life-changing impact on the reader. My feeling is that the author's main goal was to shock.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lucky Luke aka Don Psychote,
By Boris Bangemann "boyse" (Singapore) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dice Man (Paperback)
According to Time Out, this book was one of the most fashionable novels of the early 1970s; and Anthony Burgess, the author of the unsettling "A Clockwork Orange" (1962), graced it with the comment "touching, ingenious and beautifully comic.""The Dice Man" is a dark comedy, violent and hilarious at the same time; an upbeat precursor to the much grimmer "American Psycho" (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, and the similarly satirical "The Elementary Particles" (1998) by the French author Michel Houellebecq. With a light touch and in mischievously entertaining fashion, the book plays with the fundamentals of the way we understand ourselves: rationality, identity, reality; in sum, all the ways in which we construct coherence from chance, or something from nothing. Luke Rhinehart, the author (in fact, the real author's pseudonym) and narrator of the book, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Luke's actions are largely dictated by chance. He writes down alternative actions and then tosses dice to determine which action to take. The result, he claims, is freedom to live different sides of his personality. As an author, for example, he lets the dice decide what he should write in his fictional autobiography with the title "The Dice Man" and what not; and the dice decide when he should lie and when not. Consequently, he announces on page one that he is the author of "the lovely first-rate pornographic novel, Naked Before the World" only to reveal much later in the book that the dice ordered him not to write about this piece of fiction in "The Dice Man." Too bad, dear reader. The book works not only as a send-up of the psychoanalytic profession and the counter-culture of the late 1960s, it also succeeds at creating its own twisted reality - as attested by all the readers who felt that their view of the world had been profoundly changed by this novel. It is ironic that "The Dice Man" has a cult following while the book makes fun of the cult of Dice Living created by the fictional Luke Rhinehart. In a sense the cult following includes the real author himself who produced a couple of sequels to this book. The irony should not come as a surprise, though. Authors who are seriously unserious run a high risk of creating ironic side effects. One of the earliest examples is the Daoist philosopher Lao-Tse (born BC 604). He blissfully ignored the irony in his "Dao De Jing," a book that declares in the first sentence "the Dao that can be told is not the real Dao" and then goes on for some 5,000 words to explain what the Dao is. In sum, "The Dice Man" is recommended for readers who are willing to suspend the sense of their own importance for the sake of enjoying a fictional world, and to tolerate an alien system of morality for the time it takes to read this original and amusing satire.
4.0 out of 5 stars
ROLL,
By
This review is from: Dice Man (Paperback)
I love this book. The way Rhinehart (pseudonym) deals with duality in "The Dice Man" is really clever. The book is also hilarious. Definitely worth a read, and highly recommended. Some interesting philosophies.
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