POR FIN LO HE TERMINADO!!! Ha sido mi Mortirolo particular!!
Me ha costado horrores y eso que las primeras paginas prometían, bueno las 20 primeras.
Segundo libro que leo de este autor y este incluso me ha gustado mucho menos que el del autoestopista galáctico... La verdad es que hasta mas del 50 % no entendía que estaba leyendo!! Luego poco a poco se va mas o menos entendiendo pero ni con esas, todo muy poco gracioso (ummm creo que este humor no va conmigo). 1/10.
No se si darle una última oportunidad al autor con el 2º del autoestopista...
Sinopsis: Dirk Gently es un detective muy peculiar. Sherlock Holmes afirmaba que, cuando se ha eliminado lo imposible, lo que queda —sea lo que sea— es la verdad. Dirk Gently, sin embargo, jamás elimina nada, y menos que nada, lo imposible. Y para resolver sus casos prefiere recurrir a la física cuántica antes que a las huellas dactilares. Así pues, cuando le encargan la búsqueda de un gato perdido —un misterio por lo general muy fácil de desentrañar—, Dirk acaba encontrando dos fantasmas y un Monje Eléctrico venido de otra dimensión, y descubre un terrible secreto que puede acarrear la destrucción de la humanidad. También averigua la imposible, improbable, increíble y aterradora razón por la que un experto en ordenadores tuvo un sofá atascado en la escalera de su casa durante tres semanas. Pero ¿qué sucedió con el gato? El gato, infortunadamente, murió.

Adams, author of the bafflingly popular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series as well as this whimsical genre-buster and its sequel, seems to have mastered the oximoronic art of writing funny books that are actually not very funny at all. There are some wacky English characters who fall somewhere on a spectrum between Jeeves and Fat Charlie's brother Spider, and an unusual plot which plods along aimlessly and manages to make 260 pages feel like 1000, and you may smirk a couple of times but actual laughs are unlikely. Don't feel bad if you get confused by the end; Adams himself said: "All I can say is that it was as clear as day to me when I wrote it and now I can't figure it out myself."

It's all about the couch.

Allow me to elucidate. Doug Adams book. Funny? Sure. Satirical? Check. But would you have guessed intricately plotted?

Adams, who practically invented the vein of British literary humor now being minted hand-over-fist by Terry Pratchett, is in fine form with this novel, his major work outside the Hitchhiker's universe. We get the same bumbling protaginsts, the gently affable quasi-villain, the apocalyptic-threat-which-is-not-a-threat, the deft one-sentence-paragraph narratorial asides. Check, check, and checkeroo.

But we also get something we can't have gotten in Hitchhikers, which was written in sometimes lightning-round single drafts, sometimes mere minutes before the radio-plays would hit the air. Under those circumstances, there was no way for Adams to think too far in advance. It had to be joke, bang, plot, joke, action, joke, exposition...and it shows in the number of times he wrote himself into a corner and then had to pull a Deus-ex-Machina out of the sky to save the narrative.

Not so in Dirk Gently, where tiny throw-away details become massively essential plot points late in the book, and all of the little details together topple into a eperfect, crystalline structure by the end of the story. The perfect example is the bit about the couch. At the beginning of the story, we see our poor schlepp of a protagonist working his way over a couch which has gotten wedged in his stairwell. Cute bit of physical humor, and in a lesser book, that would be the end of it. Instead, long about the penultimate chapter, the couch problem becomes a part of the solution to the whole messy apocalyptic threat mentioned earlier. It's a breathtaking bit of plotting, and I can't help but think Adams revelled in the chance to prove that his gift was not just the ability to make up rapid-fire absurdity, but to really master a novel, show it who'se boss, in a way which is entirely satisfying to the reader.

Ο Ντερκ Τζέντλυ είναι μια ευχάριστη έκπληξη!
Φαντάζομαι ότι για την υπόθεση δεν μπόρούν να γραφούν πολλά όχι λόγω σποϊλερ όσο λόγω του ότι η υπόθεση του εκτείνεται ταυτόχρονα σε διαφορετικούς χρόνους και τόπους και η εμφάνιση των πρωταγωνιστών σε αυτά τα χωροχρονικά σημεία επηρεάζει την προηγούμενη και τη μελοντική εξέλιξη του έργου. Είναι και αυτή η βρετανική τηλεφωνική εταιρία που δεν παρέχει ικανοποιητικές υπηρεσίες όταν διασπάται το χωροχρονικό συνεχές, είναι και ο Σρόντιγκερ με τη γάτα του, υπολογιστικά συστήματα, καλόγεροι που πιστεύουν για να μη χρειάζεται να το κάνουμε εμείς και ...
Το βρήκα εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον και σίγουρα ο Adams θα έχει και συνέχεια γιατί σίγουρα δε μπαίνει στους συνηθισμένους συγγραφείς αλλά ούτε και στους επιτηδευμένα παράξενους!

I first read this within a year of this coming out in paperback for the first time, so I didn't remember much about it - except the Regius Professor of Chronology, who was based on an idea Adams had for the 1980 Dr Who story Shada, which never initially aired because of a BBC strike (it eventually saw the light in 2003, with voice-overs to fill in the bits that were missing).

Rereading it now, almost thirty years later, bits of it stand up very well, although it is dated in places, notably where computers and car phones are concerned. However, it still has the weirdness and whimsy I associate with Douglas Adams, and I'm glad I've reread it, and my inner musician really likes the idea of Bach's music being the music of the spheres.

A weird mystery mixed with paranormal and crazy events.

I came to the book from the brilliant and crazy TV show so it was a strange read. It was very different from the TV show, Dirk wasn't a really likable guy (the other characters were new) and the story had nothing in commun with the show. Nevertheless, Adams' style was easy to spot, with some humor and several descriptions that could be shared with Pratchett, giving the read an easy going and pleasant tone. I found the characters interesting, even if we never had the chance to know them well, but most of all, the story kept me engaged with all the strange events. I enjoyed the mix between weird mystery and paranormal, and some moments were pretty funny. Overall, a nice read, especially for its weird side.

First off, this novel is exquisitely well-plotted. All the elements of the mystery are set up perfectly and subtly, so much so that it's easy to miss them, and everything is explained satisfyingly in the end. Beyond that there's something funny on almost every page, and Adams is able to get at big themes in a meaningful way: the beauty of life, the interconnectedness of all things, the need for (and impossibility of) certainty, the way that what we believe at any given move is constantly shifting.

Here's one funny passage that illustrates Adams's talent for a great setup and punchline:

"Yes it is," said the Professor. "Wait—" he motioned to Richard who was about to go out again and investigate—"Let it be. It won't be long."

Richard stared in disbelief. "You say there's a horse in your bathroom and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?"

You can guess how the horse got in.

Douglas Adams' underated masterpiece leads Dirk Gently from a search for a missing cat to unlocking the secrets of time travel and saving the human race from total extinction.

I thought no-one could write a better comic novel than 'The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' until I first read this. I've subsequently re-read this novel countless times and it never fails to entertain, I'm still finding references to literature and popular culture that I've previously missed.

That a novel can be re-read despite the reader knowing what is about to happen is a testement to any novel but this one can be re-read with a suspition that something different will happen this time!

Funny - I enjoyed this!

I can't actually explain why I liked it as much as I did.

It is a confusing, fragmented story that only has all the pieces fall into place at its very last moments. And even then it was confusing and overwhelming.

But it was charming in its own way.

The various fragments that seemed unrelated slowly pieced together two different stories, and when these two stories started crossing in the midst of the book, I was beyond confused and pleasantly surprised by it's irrelevancy.

I'm not sure how this could have been possible as usually irrelevancy just annoys me when I try to read a book with a good story.

Supposedly it is because these seemingly unrelated bits and pieces somehow seem to complement each other. And in other ways, they made up for the lacking bits of information.

But somehow it only makes sense in hindsight.

Another thing I find interesting is the boundaries between sci-fi and fantasy. This book itself and its author are known to be classed as sci-fi, and indeed the book is ripe with scientific premisses. However I keep thinking my initial instinct of putting it on the fantasy shelf wasn't wrong.

Maybe it's a bit of both. But it just seemed to me, to be more of a fantasy book. A fantastic fantasy book, at that.

Adams' first fiction foray into a world other than the one(s) created for the Hitchhiker's Trilogy is a treat: a detective story filled with the same bizarre happenings and twists, described and narrated in Adams' inimitable comedic style. Unlike the Hitchhiker's books, however, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was written to be a stand-alone story, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. In many ways, this was Adams' first attempt at writing a proper novel--and he succeeds wildly. I was immediately captivated by the character of Dirk Gently, and drawn headfirst into his swirling, wildly-skewed version of reality, where everything is connected to everything else--so much so that something innocent randomly said on page five can (and does) become critically important on page 205. Don't bother trying to figure out the plot before the book ends, because you won't be able to do it. This is a detective novel, yes, but a Douglas Adams detective novel, where spaceships, time travel, Bach, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tea, pizza, and ex-boyfriends are so intricately linked that your head will be swimming by the time you finish the last sentence. But the dizziness is well-worth the effort.

RTC. Bookclub book of the month September.