The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - Douglas Adams (1979)

Hilarious!

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I came across this book twice in my life, but just read in the second and I regret that I have not read in the first. In the first, I was still back home when I gave a nerdy book as a nerdy gift for a nerdy friend. The book looked too nerdy for me, I did not dare.  The second experience was more than 10 years later and it started with a cake. Two colleagues of the department were having their farewell and they brought a cake. In this cake was written the following cote:

 ”So long and thanks for all the fish.” p.156

But the word ”fish” was crossed and replaced by finch because we worked with birds and them with zebra finches. I ignored the message and went for the cake, it was d-e-l-i-c-i-u-s! Days later I was commenting how amazing the cake was during lunch in the department kitchen and the colleague that had made the cake was there and she wondered if somebody paid attention to the message of the cake. I did not even have tried, my focuses were on the content. Then we finally ask what did it mean? She explained that it was a quote from a book, a book we all should read. "It can be helpful for scientific writing", she said. Okay, I decided to go for it. I asked the name of the book, took note and look for it in "amazon.de". Until this point I did not know that the nerdy book I gave to my friend and the book I was ordering was the same, the title was in Portuguese when I gave the book to my friend and I did not know the title in English. At a certain point, by doing some research about the author on the internet I got to know it was the same and I felt shocked because I never imagined I would read the nerdy book one day. And know what? It is not nerdy. It is a really psychedelic, funny, but at the same, deep narrative.

The main character is Ford Prefect, I would not be surprised if there is a symbolic meaning in his name. He is the hitchhiker that is writing a travel guide about the galaxy. It can not be crazier! He got stacked on the earth for 15 years and managed to leave by the occasion of the earth demolition together with his dude Arthur Dent, an ordinary earth guy. Arthur is like Alice in the wonderland, he is exploring and discovering the galaxy with the same annoying naiveness. They meet the crazy trio: Zaphod Beeblebrox a crazy motherfucker, Trillian Astra a pretty girl pretty smart just like a girl can be and Marvin, the Paranoid Android, a ”personality” enhanced robot that looks like a satire of the human constant unsatisfaction. They gather together and the adventure starts. Talking like this it looks silly, but silly is everything the book is not. It is rather psychedelic, it seems that Douglas Adams was under heavy drugs when he wrote the book. The narrative is full of crazy and improbable turns, sometimes a bit too crazy for me, it gets on my nerves. Some crazy shit happens they get in trouble, then another crazy shit happens, they survive. Annoying, but hilarious.

The brilliance of the narrative is the deep thought dressed as silly jokes. Several times I got me laughing like hell and in the next second staring at the window thinking about human insignificance in the universe.

It might happen because we, humans, use to think about yourselves from an anthropocentric perspective. We are always proud of your unique brain folding capacity and its implication that actually was given by a simple change in a single gene (ARGAP11B, check the cool paper of Florio et al., 2015) with the same improbability that improbable things happen in the story. In my opinion, the problem is that this mutation and all the others that shape us are taken as a sign of superiority over the other living creatures such as we have deserved it or worked for it. I think this is rather a superficial and ignorant view because it ignores everything we do not know or we do not have the tools to fully understand. And Douglas recurrently breaks this idea in his narrative beautifully in such fine balance of fun, satire, and creativity. So well together like the ingredients of the cake that brought me to the book. 

To give you a bit of the taste of it, here three of my favorite quotes:

"One of the things Ford Prefect has always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually starting an repeating the very very obvious as It's a nice day or You're very tall (...). At first, Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior (...). If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working." p. 48

Ford and Arthur were one more time in trouble. Then Arthur said:

"'You know', said Arthur, ’It’s at times like this when I am trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die for asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ’ What did she tell you?’ ’ I don’t know, I did not listen.’” p.75

Marvin was left behind for a while, meantime he got bored:

”’That ship?’ said Ford in sudden excitement .’What happened to it? Do you know?’ ’It hated me because I talked to it.’ ’You talked to it?’, exclaimed Ford. ’What do you mean you talked to it?’ ’Simple! I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,’ Said Marvin. ’And what happened?’ Pressed  Ford. ’It committed suicide,” said Marvin (...)” p. 214

And the message of the cake? The highlight of the book! It was the message of the dolphins that knew about the demolition of the earth and prepared their departure, prior to their departure they left a message that was intelligible to humans. Intelligible also to such third-world country famine like I!

There is a movie I did not watch yet and I do not want to watch before I am done with the whole series of books.