The Dice Man
LET THE DICE DECIDE.The rules are down to you. The rules that stop you seducing your neighbour downstairs, that stop you hitting your boss, that stop you leaving your family and leaving the country. The rules that stop you living.The dice don’t do rules; the dice do life.Luke Rhinehart is a psychiatrist, a husband and a father, his life locked down by routine and order – until he picks up the dice. The dice govern his every decision and each throw takes him further into a world of risk, discovery and freedom. As the cult of the dice grows around him the old order fades: chance becomes his religion, the dice his god.If you haven’t lived the life of the dice, you haven’t lived at all. Let the dice decide. And roll with it.
Читать The Dice Man онлайн беплатно
LUKE RHINEHART
The Dice Man
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Talmy, Franklin Ltd 1971
Copyright © George Cockcroft 1971
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006513902
Ebook Edition © 2012 ISBN: 9780007322244 Version: 2017-09-04
Praise for The Dice Man:
‘Touching, ingenious and beautifully comic’
ANTHONY BURGESS
‘Brilliant … very impressive’
COLIN WILSON
‘Hilarious and well-written … sex always seems to be an option’
Time Out
‘I find The Dice Man very funny indeed and sometimes almost terrifying in its accurate evocation of the amount of nonsense American psychoanalysts talk and believe in!
PROFESSOR H. J. EYSENCK
Table of Contents
to A.J.M. without any of whom, no Book.
Preface
In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Chance and without him was not anything made that was made. In Chance was life and the life was the light of men.
There was a man sent by Chance, whose name was Luke. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of Whim, that all men through him might believe. He was not Chance, but was sent to bear witness of Chance. That was the true Accident, that randomizes every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of Chance, even to them that believe accidentally, they which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of men, but of Chance. And Chance was made flesh (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Great Fickle Father), and he dwelt among us, full of chaos, and falsehood and whim.
– from The Book of the Die
‘The style is the man,’ once said Richard Nixon and devoted his life to boring his readers.
What to do if there is no single man? No single style? Should the style vary as the man
