Luego de leer Guía del autoestopista galáctico y El restaurante del fin del mundo, del mismo autor, y de ver la adaptación televisiva reciente de esta saga, esperaba algo más surrealista, delirante y con más humor. No puedo decir que me desagradó, pero tampoco que me encantó este libro.

The classic, beloved, brilliant, wacky Douglas Adams, with his penchant for paradoxes and meaningful nonsense and his totally absurd humor. It would be hard for me to chose what I loved most from this book, but I think it was the decision-making program that allows you to justify practically any outcome by back-tracing from the desired result - that could come quite handy, no?
But apart from all this, the book is quite well thought out, with a self-consistent detective story and an imaginitive and complex plot.

Douglas Adams never disappoints.

As a reread I prefer these to, "Hitchhiker." Funny well done.

To prove the theory of the interconnectedness of everything I´ll grant 3½-4, possibly 4½ star.

I have learned a lot. How the dodos became extinct, how to computer simulate the movements of a sofa while it gets stuck in a stairway and how an abacus can work in mysterious ways.
Not least have I come to know the origin of the albatros in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a thing that has puzzled me for billions of years.

I´m still very much in doubt when it comes to the death of Gordon Way, but it just may be connected to the extinction of the dodo, as everything is interconnected.

Well, except just maybe not the Electric Monk, who is quite disconnected.
Still, his horse is connected to the bathroom of Professor Reg, meaning that everything is interconnected after all.
That is if you take the horse literally, which you should as you otherwise would miss the connection.

Those were the words of Zarathustra, who, though not mentioned in the text, would be interconnected as well based alone on his holistic views.

From the title you would think this is possibly about a detective agency. Well there is an agency but they don’t detect things in the normal matter. You should probably guess that since it is a Douglas Adams book and when has he written anything really normal (I mean that in the best way).

Nope for this book n  “Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”n

There is craziness, absurdity, the interconnectedness of all things and Dirk is smack dab in the middle of it all. He will somehow figure out how a horse in a bathroom, a ghost making telephone calls, a undoable magic trick, the cat in Schrodinger’s Box and an alien electronic monk who can believe anything all have to do with one another.

It is a crazy and fantastic ride that if you just hang back and not think about it too much everything will just all into place. Most of the time Dirk Gently seems to make no sense until he makes hysterical sense. There were times I flat out belly laughed at some of the general obscurity of it.

I will never think of Sir Isaac Newton the same again – or Bach but that is a different matter.
“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"
"The what?" said Richard.
"The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."
"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."
"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ... "You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.”

I read both the Dirk Gently books years ago and they are some of the few books that I come back to years later and love for different reasons all over again. If you were a fan of the Hitchhikers series or Monty Python then this kind of humor might be exactly what you need for a good laugh.

I think this is the second time I have read this book but maybe the third time. Either way, it has been over 20 years since I last read it (I think). I always marvel how much I remember and how much I “remember” after I read it. I remembered things like “Reg answers three questions but only asks two” and “Reg pulled off that magic trick using a SPOILER” and the couch is trapped because of the SPOILER visiting Richard’s flat a few weeks ago”.
Okay – overall impression is I love this book. It has that great Douglas Adams turn of phrase but he doesn’t overdo it too much. It has a plot brimming with amazing ideas. 20 years later it has aged remarkably well despite the fact a huge plot point hinges on answering machine tapes (something we don’t have) and there is some talk about computers. The characters are all interesting and well fleshed out, for the most part (I guess Susan gets short shrift and so does the dead boss). The laugh out loud humour wasn’t exactly there but it was still more funny/enjoyable than 99% of the humour novels I have ever read. I have to give it up to Douglas Adams he is one of the few people who managed to write a humour novel that was funny and he did it on several occasions (yes he wrote huge clunkers Mostly Harmless was the biggest piece of shite ever, but most other ONLY write shite).
Even though I love the book and am amazed by some of the ideas and the way they slowly unfold there are fundamental problems with the book that keep it from being perfect. The ending is too confusing by half...and requires you to have a full knowledge of Coleridge, his dream inspired poem "Kubla Khan", the fact that a man Porlock interrupted Coleridge writing the poem so (in OUR reality) the second half never got written. and since only a handful of people would read Dirk Gently AND know this Adams fails his readers. Hard to recommend a book to your friends "great book but I can't understand the ending". As well, a few great ideas seem to peter out in the end and a few prominent story lines seem to be over emphasized at the start or trail off at the end. I mean I LOVE the idea of the Electric Monk but...did he really need to be a part of this story? And Dirk is a wonderful character but for someone so smart why is he doing nothing with his life until Richard's case falls into his lap?
Even with the problems, it is so original and enjoyable I have to still give it five stars.

I am a firm believer that a bit of British humor is good for the soul...
And I am quite American, in case you did not know...

n  n    “Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?”n  n

Douglas Adams has a highly quotable, laugh out loud writing style which I adore; I seem to remember a blurb describing this book as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with significantly fewer spaceships (I apologize that my memory fails on whom I heard this from) I can't think of a better description myself.

This book will forever be on my list of favorite books of all time.
There's really not much more I can say about it which could express my love.

n  Some of My Favorite Moments:n

“Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I shouldcall you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in aditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely,completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for milesaround. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice toyou. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.”

“The teacher usually learns morethan the pupil. Isn’t that true?”
“It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,” came a lowgrowl from somewhere on the table, “without undergoing a pre-frontallobotomy.”

...he walked a little like an affrontedheron.
The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainlyrestlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape froma sack.

“It seems odd,don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inverselywith the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinaryheights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness.”

“Well,” said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, “I hear you’vesuddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?”

“Did you know, young lady,” said Watkin to her, “that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that very suggestive.”

Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment.

The door was the way to…to…
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.
What did “psychosassic” mean?
It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meantanything at all.

“Or maybe she decided that an evening with your old tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have done. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hectic social round these days.”

Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea whathe was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before.

"...I bet that even the very lowest form of dysentery amoeba shows up to take its girlfriend out for a quick trot around the stomach lining once in a while...”

Richard reflected that Dirk’s was a face into which too much had already been put. What with that and the amount he talked, the traffic through his mouth was almost incessant. His ears, on the other hand, remained almost totally unused in normal conversation.

“Exploiting?” asked Dirk. “Well, I suppose it would be if any body ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that...”

“Let us go. Let us leave this festering hell hole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not effit after all.”

“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see?”

“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coinand the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a…”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissive shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely adiscovery. It was there to be discovered.”
He took a penny out of his pocket and tossed it casually on to the pebbles that ran alongside the paved pathway.
“You see?” he said, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap…ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention.”

“...If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.”

“Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do with a pizza...”

Maybe I'm not in the right mood for Douglas Adams, because I didn't enjoy this as much as The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I found the writing funny, but it just wasn't cracking me up, y'know? Might give it another go someday.

Also, they really spit on the source material in the BBC America TV adaption. The only things they have in common is the name Dirk Gently (Show Dirk is very different from Book Dirk in both appearance and personality) and the time travel element. They didn't even use time travel the same way. Like, couldn't you name your show something else rather than try to mooch off Adams's name?

Too many not fully expanded ideas

The concept of putting as many ideas as possible in as less book space as imaginable worked well for the hitchhiker, but in this case, it was too much, no I mean, less.

It could have been an epic milestone like the ingenious hitchhiker series, but it is simply too short and too densely packed at the same time, it´s a miracle that this is even possible.

Infodump makes one nervous toward the end
The characters and main plots could have been used for one much longer or two short books and it would have been a masterpiece again. More details in the descriptions, probably some more explanations to the reader or another side plot, infodumps, longer dialogues, it would all have been possible if Adams hadn´t tried to distill it to the absolute minimum. I got nervous the closer I got to the end because I couldn´t imagine how all those should culminate in a credible, understandable, and satisfying ending.

Deus ex machinas instead of explanations
Especially the end was really unsatisfying, so much came out of nothing, interesting ideas weren´t described in detail and everything felt quite half-baked with too many questions left unanswered and too much confusion for the reader. And I am someone who reads multi k page series with loads of settings, characters, and connections that can be understandably described by the author without a permanent "what, where, when, why, how?" like in this case.

And it goes puff
Adams' intention has been to make as many and as complex subplots, connections, and associations as possible to let them explode in an epic culmination point, but it didn´t get speed and just hit the fourth wall a tiny little bit without producing more noise than contrived harrumph to let the embarrassing moment pass by. It feels as if there should have been a second half before the sudden ending.

Amazingly still good
Don´t get me wrong, it´s still a good, philosophical book full of innuendos, connotations, and some good laughs, but don´t expect the same quality or the same entertainment as the more famous galactic fun (just the trilogy, not what follows) brought to your mind.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

Not nearly as good as Hitchhikers guide. It fell a bit flat for me actually.

I liked this a lot more than I expected to. I had read the author’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about 20 years ago and, while I remember finding it mildly amusing and clever at times, I also found it too unrealistically silly to take seriously and didn’t much care for it. My memory of that book is too fuzzy for me to say if this book is significantly different in style, or if I’ve just become more tolerant of the type of humor. I do think Pratchett’s Discworld series taught me how to enjoy silly books now and then.

I really didn’t find this book overly silly, though. It was very funny and I giggled madly through quite a bit of it, but the humor mostly felt like an integral part of the story. In the past, I've had more trouble when the story just feels like a vehicle for the humor. The electric monk was the only part I considered to be completely absurd, but he was funny so I forgave him. :)

This is a science fiction story, set mostly in the present day on our world at around the time it was published in 1987. A computer programmer named Richard seems to be having a lot of strange things happen lately. There’s a couch stuck in the stairwell to his flat that nobody can figure out how to move up or down, he has an odd visit with a former university counselor, and a rather shocking experience while he’s driving, and so on. If I attempt to give any more detail than that, I think it would spoil the story.

There are a lot of different elements packed into a fairly short book, but it was all coherent and easy to follow for the most part. I did think the resolution was very fuzzy. I understood the gist of it, but I think it was stretching things a little and failed to take into account other possibilities. Overall though, I enjoyed the book and I loved the humor.

Disappointed!
My fault certainly. After the "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", I was expecting something.... else.