Customer Reviews

I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This riveting biography sat on my bookshelf for months, a reflection of my ambivalence about starting it. As a long-time fan of PKDick, I was obliged to buy this book, of course, but I had heard things about it which caused me to wonder whether it would be a worthless speculation, a fantasia on the life of Dick. Most of these things I had heard--or rather, read--here on Amazon.

Upon beginning the book, I found myself almost immediately yanked into Dick's world and life, and, although I have another 70 or so pages to complete, I feel this book surpasses Sutin's fine biography in that it does not merely bring us the external "objective" facts of Dick's life, but vividly animates that life, putting us INTO the "koinos kosmos" of Dick: we come to experience ourselves the sweat and fear and lust and neediness and egocentricity and eccentricity and petulance and brilliance and charm and childishness and addiction and obsessions of the man, among many other of the panoply of traits which made Dick the human being and writer he was.

While as a younger "fan" I might have been threatened to see my literary hero depicted so frankly--which of course cannot leave Dick looking saintly, by any means--as a more mature person I appreciate Carrere's respect for his subject and for his readers, as he does not idealize or elide Dick's less savory traits, but incorporates them into a complex and empathetic portrait which has the feeling of truth. After all, writers are notoriously tormented or maladjusted human beings, and the writer who could have produced Dick's body of work cannot be assumed to have been merely a gently avuncular eccentric, but was a complicated man, driven by harsh anxieties and compulsions as much as by brilliance and creative fecundity.

I have read PK Dick for 30 years, and I have read all the articles and books about him I have been able to find in that time. Yes, Sutin's biography is masterful and authoritative, but I unreservedly recommend Carrere's novelistic portrait as the most powerful recreation of Dick the human being I have encountered.

Superb.

What a fascinating journey through a bizarre and brilliant mind! I had always wanted
to learn more about Philip K. Dick, but had been turned off by other articles and
books that had drained the life from Dick's story with overly dry and pedantic prose.
In contrast, Carrere offers psychological insight and philosophical speculation
that can only be described as "Phildickian." As one who had read all of
Dick's better-known works, Carrere seems to have reanimated Dick's spirit in this
compelling, partially novelized tale. What the reader sacrifices in footnotes and
verifiable fact is more than made up for by the sheer human interest of the story.

This is in no sense a scholarly work-no footnotes, no bibliography, not even a "further reading" list. Emmaneul Carrère is an unabashed fan of Philip K. Dick who, having read everything there was to read, still wanted to know more about how Dick's mind worked. He pursued this quest through much of Dick's unpublished material and apparently interviews with those who knew him. (I say "apparently" because the lack of footnotes, while adding to readability, does detract from complete clarity about sources and research methods.) Nevertheless, Carrère has produced a fascinating book, and he and his translator, Timothy Brent, have made it a very readable one, too.

Carrère gives a reasonably full account of Dick's life, while assuming that his readers are those who have already read most or all of Dick's major works, and the earlier biographies. (Cautionary note: this means that, if you haven't read Dick's major works, you should beware of spoilers.) His goal is working out an understanding of his subject's mind from this wealth of material. To what extent did the traumas of Dick's childhood (the death of his twin sister when they were a few weeks old, his parents' divorce, his mother's own obsessions) contribute to his own instability and emotional problems, and to what extent were they merely the background against which his own personality oddities played out? How did his problems and his drug use affect his fiction? How much was the drug use the cause of his later problems, and how much was it an unguided attempt at self-medication? Carrère seems both clear-eyed and sympathetic in his descriptions of not only Philip Dick, but also his parents, wives, and friends. This is a highly readable and interesting book about a fascinating writer.

Recommended.

As a longtime Philip K. Dick fan who has read almost all of his novels, I was prepared to be disappointed, but this book was eye-opening. It is said that authors write what they know, but somehow that has always seemed an approach unlikely to apply to any writer of "science fiction," let alone PKD. It was a revelation to read this biography, because over and over again, one sees how Dick's life found its way directly into his books, especially his characters. Not just in obvious places such as "Valis" or "Confessions of a Crap Artist," but in virtually every one. The author puts you effectively inside Dick's head in what was a hellacious life, even if much of that hell was Dick's own doing. And at times you find yourself not sure whether Dick himself is a character in a novel written by Carrere, and thus you feel as though you are reading one of Dick's books, with their endemic uncertainty about what is real and what is fiction. On top of all that, it is as well-done a biography of a modern author as I have read, and intriguing enough to make me want to read Carrere's fiction.

This is a fairly interesting book on Dick. It does explore the connections between his life and work, which illuminates some of the otherwise confounding conclusions to some of his novels. I think the author goes into too much detail in summarizing some of Dick's work, though, so that if you had't read Time Out of Joint, for example, or the Alphane Clans, the author pretty much spoils the ending of those books for you. The summaries could have been replaced with more details of Dick's actual life, which is kind of scanty.

My biggest complaint, though, is that the book contains absolutely no documentation whatsoever. No endnotes, nothing. Where does Carrere get his information? There's no way of knowing! I couldn't tell what was documented fact and what was the author's speculation.

I could have passed on this book. This is not the definitive biography of Philip K. Dick.

Overall, this is a nice work, but it seems to be an interpretive biography, with emphasis on interpretive.
Some may love it, depending on what kind of biography one is looking for. I would describe Emmanuel Carrere's PKD bio as melodramatic.

This is the first PKD bio I've read. Emmanuel Carrere uses PKD's books as the timeline, without much emphasis on years, which can be frustrating to some (like me). Also the author's style is somewhat flowery and heavyhanded. I almost stopped reading it in the beginning because I wanted something more straight forward.

The kicker is, PKD's life is so interesting to me, I got caught up in it and eventually appreciated Emmanuel Carrere's style.
The book is appropriately titled, A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick. Emmanuel Carrere was looking for motivation, not just describing events.

Fortunately there are other PKD bios, which I intend to read.

I don't know much about Philip K. Dick. I'm not a fan. But surfing the web, I came across some articles about him that intrigued me enough to want to learn more. I found myself spending about an hour on Amazon's Search Inside the Book, reading through as much of this book as I could (i.e., the first 3 or 4 pages of each chapter). Well, that wasn't enough to quench my thirst. So I bought it, and it was a book that I swallowed in one gulp -- I couldn't put it down. Fascinating stuff.

Carrère is a very good writer, and this is a book that works on several levels. First, he brings to life the various phases of Dick's personality, from his nerdy adolescence, to his semi-straight 20s, to his drug-drenched 30s and 40s. The book is also very good at evoking the three distinctive eras of American culture Dick lived through: the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Too, Carrère limns with great clarity the complex twists and turns of Dick's spiritual journey, and also offers thoughtful commentary on Dick's prolific body of writing (with some especially interesting observations on how the details of Dick's life were reflected and transformed in his fiction).

All in all, a great introduction to Dick. He was a fascinating man, and this is a fascinating book. Carrère is clearly a fanboy, but he's also a very smart and talented writer, so this book far transcends typical fanboy biographies. Indeed, it's a first-rate work of literature.

By way of a postscript, I liked this book so much I picked up Carrère's The Adversary -- which is a superb non-fiction thriller, another mind-blowing great read (that appears to be Carrère's specialty).

Quarter of a century after his death, Philip K. Dick's reputation and status is beginning to transcend mere founding fatherhood of modern science fiction and drift towards a more general greatness within the broader pastures of modern American literature.

Dick was exasperated about the perceived limitations of his genre while he was alive but before his untimely death in 1982 he had received industry acclaim for The Man in the High Castle in the sixties, but otherwise had garnered only cult following. Broader recognition beckoned - Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Dick's altogether more complex Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was in post-production. Fame and fortune beckoned, but by this stage, as Emmanuel Carrere makes plain, even if he had not suffered massive stroke, Philip K Dick was in no state, mental or physical, to enjoy or capitalise on it.

That Dick was a troubled soul is relatively well known, but Carrere's biography explores and extrapolates Dick's unstable mental state into his literature and life choices, which became increasingly bizarre as the Seventies wore on. Carrere sources Dick's discord in the death in infancy of his twin sister Jane, and was compounded by Dick's hypochondria - and has produced an effervescent and fascinating portrait. Carrere, perhaps by taking some licence, gives us a close and personal view into his subject's unusually complex psyche which is rare in a contemporary biography (the only other comparable example I can recall is the Gilmans' excellent Alias David Bowie). Because of Carrere's aproach, Philip K. Dick is made very real on the page.

Some will complain that Carerre's approach crosses a sacred line into fictionalising, but philosophically I don't have a problem with that (I'm not sure there even is such a line in fact): particularly since Philip K Dick is long dead, outside the content of his oeuvre we don't have any "facts" against which Carrere's story can be measured - which will give pause in some quarters - but it doesn't feel to me that Carrere has breached the poetic licence he undoubtedly as as a biographer. That the complaints, such as they are, have mostly been "in principle" and not on substance seems to confirm that. These are fair fictionalisations, that is, and they paint a vibrant and fascinating picture of the man and an excellent introduction to his major works which are analysed and contextualised in a good amount of detail.

The implication, never actually made, is that Dick's hypochondria transcended simple pharmaceutical dependence and evolved into paranoia and ultimately genuine psychiatric illness. One might wonder what effect the cinematic success of Blade Runner and the many subsequent Dick dramatisations might have had on his mental state and subsequent writing career, but not for long: on Carrere's account he was a burnt-out husk by the end so, most likely, none.

Carrere is a novelist himself, and he writes well - as, it should be said, does his translator. This didn't feel at all like a translated book.

Well recommended.

Olly Buxton

At the start I wondered about this biography - how personal it is. It's like those documentaries of dinosaurs and alien worlds that are so realistic, so convincing - I have to keep reminding myself that they aren't real - they're just imaginative realisations. So it is with Mr Carrere's biography. Because I have devoured all of PKD's works - over and over again - he made SUCH an impression on me - I was concerned that I might have hated this psuedo biography.
But, in fact I loved it. It is so much easier to read than the excerpts of the Exegesis that I have read. It struggles to make sense of those rambling thoughts of a man who, by all measures, was not an ordinary thinker. And the 'imagined' insights into PKD and the way his life developed have a validity generated from the fact that the novels and short stories (and I know these so well) are a source of these insights.
What is especially pleasing about this biography is that it doesn't pretend to understand PKD's extraordinary beliefs and behaviour, neither does it gloss the man or try to turn him into a saint.
Read Lawrence Sutin's biography - 'Divine Invasions' - for a less imaginative study of PKD's life (not to say unemotional - Sutin's biography drew more emotional response from me that did Carrere's), but add to it, by all means, with Mr Carrere's biography.
Of course, there is absolutely no substitute to reading PKD's own writing. Don't think the movies are a substitute either although they are a wonderful indicator of respect for PKD - and I can't wait to see what they do with 'A Scanner Darkly'.

recommendations:
all the short stories of PKD
all the novels of PKD (including the mainstream novels - not SF)
'Divine Invasions - A Life of Philip K Dick' by Lawrence Sutin
the movies 'Blade Runner', 'The Minority Report'

This book is not just a biography of Philip K. Dick, famous science fiction writer; the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report are based on his stories. It is also an attempt to find out what made him tick, to get inside his mind. And that is a strange place to be.

Dick was born in 1928, near Berkeley, California, half of a set of twins. Evidently, his mother knew little or nothing about child rearing, because Jane, his twin, died at 6 weeks of age, possibly of starvation. Her death affected Dick for his entire life.

He was a big lover of classical music, and a voracious reader, especially of psychology, philosophy, and later in his life, religion. Dick never achieved his dream of becoming a "serious" novelist, though not for lack of effort. Writing science fiction simply paid the bills, until he became successful at it.

His first wife was a Communist sympathizer (having an FBI file in 1950s Berkeley was practically a badge of honor), he got his second wife sent to a mental hospital, and his third wife left him, and took their young daughter, when he objected to her getting a job outside the home. Dick had a fear of being alone. Dick was a paranoid agoraphobic who was subject to panic attacks. He was, shall we say, well acquainted with the world of prescription drugs, taking them for all sorts of physical and mental ailments. On speed, he could write a novel in two weeks, without sleeping, though he knew that he would physically pay for it later. In later years, he was perceived as some sort of LSD guru, even though he took it only once. There were a couple of stints in drug rehab.

As a youngster, during one of his rare trips to a movie theater, Dick was suddenly convinced that nothing existed outside the theater. The four walls and the pictures on the screen were the sum total of reality. Another time, he wondered if he was really alive, or if he was simply an android who was programmed with false memories so that he would think that he was alive. In later years, Dick turned a couple of innocent fan letters from Eastern Europe into a plot to get him behind the Iron Curtain, and keep him there.

Anyone who has ever read one of Dick's novels, or seen one of the movies based on his stories, needs to read this book. For those not familiar with Philip Dick, read this as a look into the mind of a very strange person.