As most reviews on my blog are for children’s or Young Adult books, I think I should start by saying that this one is for a book with ‘content’ and so some discussion of that ‘content’ might come through.
Then, to begin my review, I think I need to say I am reading this book 40 years after it was published, and therefore feel like it didn’t have the same effect on me that it seems to have had when it was released.
But, having said that, a book is a book no matter when it is read and this one left me weary and disenchanted. Not with life, as the back of the book claims (“It’s not often that a book changes your life. This one will”) but with the book itself. And I found myself thinking “Why did I read that?” Well the short answer for that is “bookclub”. And so in that spirit, I’m not bagging out the choice (I’m sure not everyone liked my choice) but the book, which I’m entitled to do.
It took me nearly two and a half weeks to get through it. It was laborious and painful and full of a ridiculous philosophy and misogynistic, chauvinistic ideas. And above all, it was as if he was trying to shock for shock’s sake. That is why I said earlier that I was reading it 40 years after it happened, at times I wondered whether I had been desensitized to so much of what he was saying by movies and TV shows today. When ‘rape and murder’ are the two worst things he could come up with (which, don’t get me wrong, are both horrible!) they somehow don’t compare to all the appalling ‘torture porn’ that seems to be so popular these days. I just wasn’t shocked. But I was put off by the character’s (and author’s) delight in them.
Early on there is a scene where the main character decides that if a die (that is hidden beneath a playing card) is showing a 1 when he unveils it, he will go down stairs and rape his best friends wife. It is and he does. But before we get to that point in the story, we’ve already been told that they’ve both been tempted to cheat before so when she only offers minor resistance, then agrees, then enjoys it more than he does, the shock value just isn’t there. But again, there was that disturbed feeling that he felt it was worth writing about.
Later, when he is taking orders from the dice and doing the most ridiculous things, all of which I found boring and/or simply attention seeking, he decides that he needs to experience sex with a man. Despite the many colourful descriptions of his sex with women, this only gets a one line chapter: “My ass is going to hurt tomorrow.” For a book that is supposed to be about breaking down the personality and removing all inhibitions, and one that is written in a way that is supposed to shock the audience to pay attention, I found it incredibly disappointing that the author could not shock himself and describe this scene in the same detail. I did not necessarily want to read it, but its omission seemed at odds with the rest of the book.
Then, after making a case for ‘dicelife’ and establishing that nothing matters, not even dicelife, he describes some ‘successful’ cases where it has helped as a form of therapy for certain people. The fact that many of these people are dead because the dice told them to kill themselves or their families is mentioned in an off-hand way and not actually included in his list of side effects.
I agree with him on one point: dicelife doesn’t matter. And neither does this book. It’s not what the reviews say about it. All the quotes about how important it is and how it will ‘change your life’ are rubbish. It is the manifesto of a pretentious psychologist who is bored with life and wishes to inflict that boredom on the rest of the world.
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