https://speculiction.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-of-time-out-of-joint-by-philip-... ( )

The theme here, almost four decades before The Truman Show, was already becoming an obsession for Philip K Dick: that the ordinary world is not what it seems; and that behind it, or beneath it, beyond it in some way, is the real thing.
    It’s the late 1950s and in a small unnamed town the middle-aged Ragle Gumm lives with his sister and her husband. Although he doesn’t go out to work, he does have one talent: solving a daily puzzle run by the Gazette newspaper. He’s been its champion for two-and-a-half years now, makes a modest but steady income and has become a celebrity as a result; but it’s harder work even than a regular job and the strain is beginning to show.
    The town itself seems ordinary enough, except for occasional jarring details: like absentmindedly reaching for a light-cord in a dark bathroom…to find it isn’t there, to find it was never there in fact and that what is there is a wall-switch. Or finding a magazine containing an article about a world-famous film star…who no one has heard of. “We can put everything we know together, he realized, but it doesn’t tell us anything, except that something is wrong. And we knew that to start with. The clues we are getting don’t give us a solution; they only show us how far-reaching the wrongness is.” It’s the classic dilemma: is your “world” really a sham of some kind, or is this you in the early stages of a breakdown? How can you possibly tell, from the inside so to speak? If it is all a sham, who is behind it and why? And above all, what happens if you put that “world” to the test and try breaking out, try leaving?
    This is one of Dick’s early novels and the writing is comparatively unhurried—he takes his own good time unravelling Ragle’s world. And while perhaps not as meticulously thought through as Truman would be forty years later, even this early in his career the main obsessions are already there: the nature of reality, conspiracies and paranoia, madness or the fear of madness—and escape. ( )

I usually prefer the Dick's short stories but I'm now trying to go through the novels. This one was pretty good. It was one of the better Cold-War themed books of the Golden Age of SF. Written in 1959 it was ahead of it's time. ( )

Libro più da 5 stelle che da 4. Un quattro virgola sette, direi. Ma le cinque stelle si dovrebbero assegnare solo ai capolavori...
I temi qui sono la paranoia, la pazzia (o la presunzione di essa), la dualità dell'apparenza della realtà e via così. Tutti temi molto cari all'autore, mancano invece i riferimenti ad androidi e droghe che spesso troviamo all'interno dei romanzi di P.K. Dick.
La storia è piuttosto semplice ma molto curiosa: cosa succederebbe se un uomo comune, ma con caratteristiche speciali, si convincesse che il mondo ruota intorno a lui ?
Anni dopo da questa idea è nato il Truman Show, ma vi dico già, per non farvi arrabbiare pensando ad uno spoiler, che questo libro e il film differiscono parecchio, quasi totalmente. L'idea però è similare. Cosa è reale ? E se fosse tutto finto ? E se io fossi il protagonista del mondo intorno a me ?
Per i primi 2/3 della storia il mistero e l'azione sono coinvolgenti al massimo, nell'ultimo terzo, quando finalmente viene spiegata la verità si è sommersi da tantissime rivelazioni contemporaneamente. Alcune di esse sono un po' raffazzonate, diciamoci la verità. Non si incastra tutto alla perfezione, perché viene gettata troppa carne al fuoco. D'altro canto questo evita anche un finale banale.
Quasi perfetto, scritto benissimo, come c'è da aspettarsi da Dick. Molto filosofico pure (infatti i riferimenti alla filosofia, da parte del protagonista in un ottica quasi metanarrativa, sono parecchi). Vien quasi voglia di rileggerlo da capo dopo averlo finito. ( )

Really good novel that is kind of like the movie, The Truman Show. Reality is not what it seems! A coworker told me about this one. ( )