Reviews

I loved this movie as a kid but had yet to actually read the books. I'm glad I finally got around to it and got see the genius of Douglas Adams' humor. Seriously, if you're considering a career in comedy, I think this is essential reading. The main style consists of leading the reader to what appears to be a big dramatic moment which is then completely undercut with a joke. Each books ends in this manner and the writing makes you forget that this stylistic point is coming. The ending of the series left me divided on whether I liked it or not, but I should have seen it coming based simply on Adams' style.

The other humor device I particularly loved was how Adams took normal human behavior and had a character not from Earth completely misinterpret the function of said behavior. This mostly happens with Ford and his interactions with Arthur which makes their conversations amazing.

The final bit I really enjoyed was the pseudo-absurdist take on the question of the meaning of life. There's never really a clear answer and I believe there's even a point where the narrator explains that if you did find the answer you would be dissappinted regardless. The pursuit of the question of life, the universe and everything always ends in a joke, highlighting this idea of the answers being disappointing. Arthur finds meaning throughout the series in the routines and relationships he develops, but is always caught somewhere between being a misanthrope and hopeful.

10/10 would reccomend.

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4.0

42. The answer for life, universe and everything. Since long people believed that Douglas Adams had just made that up, but that was not the case. The guy, was truly a genius, and that is what I am going to write here. I recently completed this bumpy, hilarious and strange journey through all five of his books, and I am wondering why I didn't read it before.

Douglas Adams initially wrote for radio. Writing novels was not his calling. He had this radio series way back in 1978, a collection of fits-as he called it-was produced, containing six parts. After that in 1980 he wrote the first book and the fifth novel of the trilogy (yeah, that is how it is referred, he was weird that way) was published in 1992. He took us to extreme ends of emotional spectrums, he threw us into philosophical abyss, he made me laugh hard, and confused me with his loopy, frolloping writing style. Since these books were written over a large period of time, those are governed by his state of mind and the mood of the story varies a lot. It is just not possible to sum up everything in a nice package with a nice bow on it, like his writing I’d hitchhike across the whole the spectrum of his writing in this post.

Galaxy has a peculiar writing style. Its humour is different. The juxtaposition of different things in a sentence is so bizarre that you’d be caught by surprise at least once in a page. I guess, Adams viewed his novel universe differently, or rather indifferently and that allowed him a particular vantage point which was really away from the space and time. He would break the most fundamental constructs of a language, would invent words which phonetically describe the emotion he wanted to convey. He would at times write few of the most convoluted pieces of writings, that you’d have to read again to grasp and appreciate the intricacies of his writing.

Galaxy is at times philosophical and thought provoking. The nature of this philosophical writing is not apparent. You’d just move ahead reading a certain paragraph and be like, what did he just say? Then you come back and read it again, only to realise that there was something profound in it. A comment about society, a comment about lifestyles and people. These comments are often made so lightly that you’d wonder was that really what he intended or we are reading much into it.

Adams was a creative genius. The analogies he used, the metaphors he added were vivid and imaginative. Apart from that just the creative imagination and out of the box thinking perplexed a lot of times. Here are few of such excerpts. It is important to consider how crazy one should be able to think to come up with things like Total Perspective Vortex.

There are no discernable villains in the series, or at least Adams does not paint anyone dark enough to be a called as a villain in popular terms. He presents personalities, which vary from clueless Arthur to weird zaphod. Of all them, I loved the one and only, Marvin the Robot. This one is a personality experiment gone terribly wrong. He is so depressing, complaining, tiring that he becomes over the top hilarious, and Adams does not give it a chance of respite either. He apparently has no expiry, and he has consciousness, I guess that makes him bitter as he is. He along with Bowerick Wowbagger are awarded with supposed immortality and that has not gone down well with either, which makes them depressing, bitter, sarcastic, insulting and all other related emotions on the spectrum. Beyond the humour their predicament is definitely thought provoking.

There are five books as I mentioned before, but unfortunately not all of them are great. Personally I found the first two to be extremely good, flawless in the content and presentation, the later two paint a declining graph and the last one again lifts it up. The overall ending of the series is technically spot on but grim. Adams was criticised for that too, and so he started writing a sixth volume. Unfortunately he died of heart attack before he could complete it. These five volumes still complete the story arc though.

This was a fundamentally different book that I have come across. People have given life altering credit to this one. There are bunch of threads like every book has, but the cloth weaved using those has turned out fantastic. It provides comfort, it provides utility, it provides a sharp blow, at times all of this together. The first couple books are definitely recommended. If you happen to like it very well, then the rest of the series will be enjoyable too.

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