The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy | Book Review

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

A relatively short book. Funny, humorous and quite easy to read. Which I first thought to be otherwise. I was so immersed in the book from the start that I completed it in one go. It took me around a half dozen hours, a relatively slow speed i suppose.

Anyway, it was interesting from the very first pages. There was some wicked dark humor. In very first couple of pages the Earth is destroyed by Vogons in order to a create a spatial bypass. These Vogons are also responsible and famous for reading out their puking and unbearable poetry to whomever who would listen and torturing them to death.

On every other page we are on a completely different part of the universe, with the most quirkiest and memorable characters possibly imagined. Let it be our main protagonist Arthur Dent, his joyously nihilist and dark humoured friend Ford Perfect, the two headed narcissistic Zaphod or be it 'the paranoid' robot Marvin, who is chronically depressed because he is kept idle in spite of having heck of artificial intelligence, who is my personal favorite character in the book. And who would forget Frankie and Benjy, the mastermind rats.

However with all its humorous tone, there are serious issues the author try to suggest in his satirical writing. Well I didnt get most of it, but no one really did. Meaning of life, as he suggests in book is, number '42'. Well it seems that the answer is quite absurd and dubious despite being certain, but in fact it is the very question of whether life has a meaning, is absurd than the answer itself. The author maybe humorously mocks our curiosity suggesting that how futile it is to ask such question, which we already know we would have no answer for. Also the authors mocks the today's obsession for scientific materialism with his wicked simple writing style. Maybe Marvin is representation of that here. And small this human species and Earth is compared to the grand vastness of the Universe.

Its a great book. There are many sequels to the book, it was just, I think an introductory book for following sequels to come. Hoping to read them soon.

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