امتازم ۳.۵

"Where do I fit?"

Content warning: mental illness.

In the midst of episodes of depression, an essential sense of isolation and desolation hits me. Nihilism roots itself in my brain and will not be dislodged. There's a loneliness that, perhaps ironically, can't be palliated by the presence of other people. Certainly not strangers, who are unworthy of trust and are motivated by nothing but petty self-interest and dominance displays.

This kind of thinking pervades a huge chunk of this book, and as someone whose view of the rest of humanity hasn't exactly been improved by life starting in about 2016, and continuing through a year and a half's (and ongoing) actual isolation from it, it was not easy to read a lot of the time. In a sense it's good to know that there was somebody out there, once, who seems to have felt the same way as I often feel now.

At times things in Mostly Harmless get straight-up nasty and viscerally unpleasant to read. Animals try to communicate with humans, and are rebuffed, and in one case, brutally killed. Arthur looks for advice from a sage, which he eventually gets, but not until we go through an extended gross scene where he ends up vomiting. Every character in the book is isolated in some way, with the possible exception of Ford. Arthur stumbles numbly through the entire book, and has a number of reunions and a meeting with a relative he was previously unaware of, and no one is happy to see each other, whether because of the circumstances or because Adams decided to depict them in a grinchy way.

The overt nastiness thankfully settles down maybe halfway through the book, and we spend the rest of the time assembling the pieces that will lead to the conclusion, which directly parallels the series' beginning. Adams' wild imagination feels more in control and steady here than in earlier books, and I think this novel is better structured than any of the rest*. The new Guide is fascinating (despite its being created by an evil corporation), and one of the better things about the book.

* True, Life, the Universe, and Everything had a structure, too: "boring fetch quest."

As one might be able to guess, a reader who's looking for the hectic energy of the first couple of Hitchhiker's books is bound to be disappointed. I was all set to reject this one, myself--not solely because it was like living in my own stupid brain with somebody else's imagination for a few hours--but in the end, I thought it was excellent. This 40-ish Adams might have been having a tough time mentally while writing this book, for sure. But he was also brilliant. This one's certainly worth a reread at some point, but I think it'll have to be during a time that is quite different from this one. That isn't true of the first couple of books, which I can reread at any time without descending into despondent rambling...

(Spoilers ahead)



Douglas, GURL, what happened?

I know you said it was a bad year for you but DAMN. I guess we all underestimated how much of a BAD FUCKING YEAR it was. Wow.

Almost Harmless is not as funny as the previous books, not as thoughtful, not as interesting, not as intriguing and just not good at all. It's too slow-paced and all the things that happen in the book aren't even related to each other (or even to the last few books). They're completely random facts unrelated to the story, and the only real relevance they have is that they're happening to the characters of the series.

In this book, there's an Alternate Universe (?), and an Alternate Trillian. While that concept sounds interesting, it's actually still boring and Trillian is just... so annoying. I used to like her, but while reading the beginning of this fifth book, I couldn't bring myself to even care about her. I already started the book wishing for it to end soon, and each time that I read a new paragraph I just kept wishing more and more for the boredom to end (at the very least).

I put it on hold because there were other stuff I was interested in reading and that I had an idea that I'd actually like, but a friend of mine went ahead and read the rest of the story. She offered to tell me spoilers, and when I heard about them, I was so upset.

Trillian steals sperm from Arthur to have a kid and she names her daughter RANDOM FREQUENT FLYER. She barely raises her child, and then decides to leave her with Arthur claiming that she's his responsibility now even though the guy DOESN'T EVEN KNOW of his daughter's existence.

But okay, that's not even the worst part.

The worst part is that everyone, minus Zaphod, dies in the Earth explosion. I already don't like character death (as it was shown on the These Broken Stars review) but the fact that after ALL THEY'VE BEEN THROUGH SINCE BOOK ONE meant literally zero in the end was... worse.

I felt the same way I felt when I watched the ending of How I Met Your Mother.

YOU COULD LITERALLY STOP WATCHING THE TV SHOW/READING THE SERIES AT EPISODE 1/BOOK 1 AND YOU'D BE AT THE SAME SPOT. LITERALLY NOTHING CHANGED.

n  EXCEPT THE BEGINNING WAS BETTER, OBVIOUSLY.n