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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Missing the point?,
By
This review is from: Valis (Paperback)
I am a huge PKD fan, and I put this among my favorite of the man's work. It is a difficult work, yes. It took me 3 tries before I could get through the first 70 or so pages. I feel that many of the reviewers here are overlooking a major part of the story. Yes, it's full of endless religious speculation and it is terrifically solipsistic and postmodern, but beyond all that, it is one of the most heart-wrenching books about grief that I have ever read. VALIS is not about YHWH in pink lasers, or the Gnostic gospels (Well, _of course_ it's about both of those things, just bear with me), it is about a man who has lost, and because of that, is lost. He cannot allow himself to understand death and goes on a quest to understand everything but. It's a brilliant novel, not one for everybody, but certainly one for the ages.
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Arcane Religious Philosophy as Schizophrenic Quasi-Biography,
By
This review is from: Valis (Paperback)
This book comes from the later stages of PKD's career, when he probably didn't even care about making his books accessible to the masses. That's something that up-and-comers have to do, and by this point PKD was surely trying to sort out his own personal philosophies in narrative form. You can see the websites for several different PKD fan clubs for speculation on what was going through his mind when he wrote this one. Here we have musings on religious visions, spiritual quests, and arcane ancient Greek and Gnostic Christian philosophies. Obviously one would also suspect experimentation in the arts of mind expansion, though in real life (if such a thing exists) PKD hated to be branded in that way. These are all played out by the typically off-center characters and curveball speculative plotlines of classic PKD. This book can be quite frustrating at times, with long philosophical passages that are merely a mishmash of ideas PKD had come across in his personal studies, and that lead to philosophy overload but with little direction or grand overall insight to be found. Plus you have to wonder if this book is a literal or merely mental autobiography, or not an autobiography at all but one of PKD's subversive storytelling techniques, designed to warp the reader's mind. This book is told in both first and third person by the same character, a schizophrenic with two personalities that operate simultaneously and even interact with each other (a feature of several PKD stories). Here one of the two selves is the increasingly insane Horselover Fat and the other is his sane alter ego, who happens to be the author PKD himself. Ultimately, the mass philosophical confusion of this novel morphs into sheer fascination, albeit in a pretty cluttered way. Note that the make-believe movie seen by the characters in this book was expanded by PKD into another novel - *Radio Free Albemuth* - which was not published during his lifetime. A story within a story within a quasi-mental-autobiography, as it were.
44 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
PDK at his strangest,
By P. Nicholas Keppler "rorscach12" (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Valis (Paperback)
Before this, he had written about a robot-hunter who suspects he may be a robot himself and a world in which people age in reverse, but Valis is the point where Philip K. Dick really got weird. Based on a supposed experience of the author himself, Valis is the story of Horselover Fat, a man who God (or some being of the sort) contacted using a pinkish ray of light. Fat is a 60s burnout trying to survive in the 70s and this encounter encourages him to write an exegesis, explaining the workings of the universe which apparently include a race of three-eyed creatures and an elaborate system of holograms. Fat is egged on by a group of friends including the Catholic David, the cynical Kevin, the cancer-ridden Sherri and a science fiction named Philip K. Dick, who freely admits he is also Horselover Fat (It will almost make sense after you have read it). Valis is part postmodern experiment, part philosophical treatise and even part science-fiction novel. For people who like their literature inventive, pensive and consciously bizarre (and that is how most Dick fans like their literature), Valis is sure to be a winner.
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