Strange, funny, fascinating and compelling ( )

The most delicious book I've read all year. Tasted excellent. Further tweaked an already derailed world view. The humor is honest, unapologetic. A subversive tale to end all. ( )

The Dice Man was recommended to me by a friend a couple of years back. His brief synopsis sounded familiar - I'd definitely heard or read something about it, but that was all I knew. After discovering a few months ago that I still hadn't read it, he loaned me his own copy. Finally - feeling guilty about leaving it sitting around so long - I promoted it to the top of my "to be read" pile and got stuck in. I can't believe I put it off so long, and I'm glad my friend was so persistent.

This novel has the author in the lead role, as a psychiatrist who decides to start choosing all of his actions by the roll of the dice. He does this in an attempt to add some variety to his life, as he's feeling blocked creatively, professionally, and in his relationship with his wife and family. Soon he begins to plan his whole life by creating lists of potential goals and activities and choosing from them at random. His willingness to list outrageous possibilities and his determination to follow through on the outcome of the dice quickly result in his life spiralling into chaos - yet he finds this state (which even includes a stint in a mental institution) to be much more personally fulfilling than the successful professional life he'd been leading previously.

This is an amazing book! I found it to be an insightful look at what it means to be happy or successful in modern society, and at the sometimes paralysing sense of apathy or immobility that can infect even the most outwardly happy people. The preface sets up the premise of the story by warning that the narrative will change tack at random according to the roll of the author's dice - and while this metafictional technique could have resulted in a disjointed and unreadable story I found that it worked extremely well, giving the author license to switch from first person narrative to transcripts of audio recordings, to excerpts from news articles and so on.

It's satirical, with a pervasive black humour that had me laughing out loud at times. The protagonist is certainly no saint, and uses the dice to give himself an excuse to perform some pretty horrible acts - nonetheless I found him to be a sympathetic and at times even quite likeable character.

This book reminded me a lot of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club", though it predates it by 25 years. They both seemed to me to have that same black humour, and both describe a protagonist's confrontingly non-traditional search for a meaning of life.

I thoroughly enjoyed it - now I'll have to grab a copy for myself! ( )

En skræmmende historie som sætter tingene på spidsen. Skæbnen bliver styrede af en terning og manden lever efter terningens udfald. ( )

This is a fantastic book! It says on the back it is a "cult classic" which sometimes puts me off as niche market type books, but this sounded like an interesting idea so I gave it a go.Basically, its about a psychologist who starts living his life by letting dice decide which option he will go with - sometimes fairly minor decisions, sometimes major ones like leaving his wife and children, or choosing to murder somebody.This book is funny, quirky, original and very intriguing, and it had me hooked and reading as quickly and intensely as possible alongside full-time job and looking after a three-year old. Its definitely a book I'll be hanging on to, and that will stay with me for a long time. I might also try and hunt down the sequel.... ( )