L' uomo dei dadi

I let the dice dictate what review I write. My review should be... 1. a normal one 2. just 1 word 3. a fairy-tale 4. in rhyme 5. a hatemail 6. non-existent I roll a... 4 As the author of this book already said, Never create an option on which you don't want to bet. So now I am stuck with having to write a revi Leggi tutto

Author Too in Love with his Own Concept to See the Gaping Blindspots This is a novel which was recommended to me by friends as "if you liked Fight Club you'll love this." Though I can see the comparison, I liked Fight Club and I really didn't like this one. Fight Club was lean and taut, this was

The novel is a cult black comedy lavishly laden with the zeitgeist… A game of chance… A life of chance… The Dice Man considers himself to be a religious person but he substitutes God with a throw of the dice… I am admired and praised by thousands of dicepeople throughout the nation but have twice been Leggi tutto

[Original review, Dec 2009] The basic plot of The Dice Man is simple. The hero, pretty drunk, is cleaning up one evening after a party. He sees a die lying under a playing card, and a thought comes into his head: if it's a one, I'll rape Arlene. He picks up the card, and it is, indeed, a one! So he g Leggi tutto

I understand the appeal of the concept. It's very intriguing, but the main character is a childish, racist, homophobic imbecile. People who love this book are enamored by a narcissist who supplies them a guilt free method to behave like psychopaths.

Turgid, flabby, lackluster prose struggling to elevate an obscene and immoral wiseass. I should have abandoned it as soon as I saw the page count, because as I suspected it is overblown, overlong, and over-the-top. This is a shame because the world of mental illness has not been all that well-depict Leggi tutto

(You can see my video review for the book here: https://youtu.be/XxsyKwDa3iQ ) In The Dice Man , the first time the protagonist picks up the dice to choose what the rest of his life will look like, the moment is given an appropriate amount of weight. His standard existence up to this point has been de Leggi tutto

The Dice Man resembles comic narratives set in academia, such as David Lodge 's Small World: An Academic Romance or Robert Grudin ’s Book . However, this is not only a satire of the psychiatric industry in America; at times, it reads like the type of radical re-thinking of reality that often accompanie Leggi tutto

Well this book provided me with a first - it is the first book (as an adult) I have started reading and not finished. Usually, no matter how dull a book gets, I plough on to the end in hope of a revival 3/4 of the way through, but of The Dice Man, 140 pages were all I could bear before it was thrown Leggi tutto