Sempre bello leggere anche solo poche righe di un romanzo di Douglas Adams, anche se inconcluso. Le interviste e gli iscritti hanno tutti qualcosa di interessante anche se dopo un po’ diventano un po’ noiosi.

It was inevitably at least a little disappointing, but then, this is the price of entry paid at the start, and we understand it explicitly: we will never know the end of this last tale. Further, we'll never know whether Adams would have kept it in Gently form, or figured out how to transform it into another (final?) Hitchhiker.

The journey through was sometimes a little dull, which for me was a disappointing realization as a fan of DNA's many styles and interests. This isn't at all unusual for a journey, however. There are always boring bits on the road. It was fine. I was traveling just the same. Some of the tech talk is outdated, but most still worthy of the knowledge and insight Adams had gathered, sifted, and filtered. The fiction, when I came to it, was a delight, exciting, intriguing. New scenery, but familiar, because it was Adams country, through and through. Unexpected laughter sometimes startled people near me, as had always happened when I read a Douglas Adams book.

Knowing and willingly paying the price might have made it easier when I came to the end. But I was still, unexpectedly, perplexingly, sad to reach the precipice, a road which was, assuredly, going *somewhere*, but torn away ahead of me, a great cloudy chasm in its place, and fuzzy shapes on the other side of it, too far to make out distinct forms or gauge the distance properly. If only. If only.

This technically is the 3rd book in the Dirk Gently series. Sadly, it's not really a Dirk Gently book. You see, before Douglas Adams could write/finish this third book, he died of a sudden heart attack in a gym in Santa Barbara in 2001.

But he left behind fragments of chapters or chapters and their rewritings and a lot of other notes on his various computers. His wife, daughter, agent, editor, assistant and other people then pieced together what is now The Salmon of Doubt which would have been the title of the third book.

This book is divided into three parts:
1) Life
2) The Universe
3) And Everything
which is a tribute to his Hitchhiker book(s).

There is much more in this book than simply another story (or the beginning of one). The first two parts are filled with snippets, random thoughts DA wrote down about tea and cookies and computers and other stuff, interviews for various magazines and newspapers he did, as well as speeches he gave for all sorts of occasions.
For example, did you know how much Douglas Adams got involved with environmentalism? Yes, this giant (literally) of a man did not just love all things Apple, but thanks to a trip done with biologist Mark Carwardine, he also became a staunch defender of bio-diversity. Most notably, he loved and tried to protect rhinos. He even climbed the Kilimandscharo in a rhino costume in order to raise money for "Save the Rhino" (a wildlife conservation organisation). Here he is:

Naturally, it was much more of an ordeal than he had originally thought, which he explains in his very unique hilarious way (seriously, I almost suffocated when reading his account of that trip).

My favourite story though is of the cookies. Here it is:

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, "What am I going to do?"

In the end I thought "Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it.", and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, "That settled him." But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.

The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

Typically British. And, strangely, or not so strangely because it's typical DA, a perfect anecdote about life.

This book, therefore, grants a unique insight into the author's mind, his anxiety that sometimes bordered on depression, his early years and struggle, the sudden fame and success, the maddening battle with Hollywood, his private life even.
And it shows how beloved and respected he was by family, friends and colleagues. I mean, Stephen Fry penned the Foreword and Richard Dawkins the Epilogue! Just the list of people he knew and often also how he got to know them is staggering.

Alas, this is the end. So to speak. Fortunately, I can look forward to reading the 4 other Hitchhiker volumes as I haven't read those yet. It's amazing what kind of a legacy this man left behind (not just through his books, but also radio programmes, BBC contributions, movies, TV shows etc).

Trigger Warning:
This book is sometimes difficult to read; at least to those people who mourn the author, or generally feel for people who have to cope with sudden loss. It sure made me cry at certain points.

If you miss the friendly, exacting voice of Douglas Adams, I recommend this posthumously published last visit to the familiar retreat of his silly metaphors, triple negatives, and delightful humor. This is a compilation of essays, interviews, letters, lectures, and fiction, which covers everything from swimming with manta rays to running with dogs; atheism, religion, and quantum mechanics ("There is one particular model of the universe that has turtles all the way down, but here we have gods all the way up"); the lyrics to "Do-Re-Mi"; the Beatles; to what kind of martinis he enjoyed, and how to properly brew a cup of tea. There is an interview with American Atheists magazine in which he seems baffled as to why Americans care who is atheist. (Q: "What message would you like to send to your Atheist fans?" A: "Hello! How are you?") There is an introduction he wrote to a tenth anniversary edition of The Original Hitchhiker Scripts that begins, "I do enjoy having these little chats at the front of books. This is a complete lie, in fact." ("It is very unfair to be asked to write an introduction to a book which contains an absolutely brilliant introduction written on the very subject of introductions to books," writes Stephen Fry in the foreword.)

It was inside the eerie, orange light of a sandstorm that I read him lecture about the "four ages of sand" to describe how we explore and discover our universe: From sand, we make glass, to make telescopes, and then microscopes, and then the silicon chip, and finally fiber optics in the information age. He wrote a great deal in the nineties about what would happen next in the technology world, including an opinion piece in the UK debut issue of Wired Magazine in 1995 (included within). From a hotel bathtub, ca. 1996, he wrote a relatively lengthy article using a Psion palmtop. "I have never written anything in the bath before," he wrote. "Paper gets damp and steamy, pens won't write upside down, typewriters hurt your tummy, and if you are prepared to use a PowerBook in the bath, then I assume that it isn't your own PowerBook."

Adams recommends a couple of his own favorite books. Reminder to myself to read Man on Earth by John Reader and The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

The last third of the book is unfinished material he was writing for a third Dirk Gently novel. As you might have guessed, it's entertaining and well crafted, and it will hurt your heart a little, as you realize just how good it would have been if it were finished -- not to mention the letdown of an incomplete mystery novel where nothing is resolved and the author took its secrets with him.

In the epilogue, Richard Dawkins writes, "Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computers has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met."

While reading this, I've had one thought running in my head the whole way through: I wish I could've met Douglas Adams.
Whether he's telling about the time he walked around Africa in a rhino suit for charity, teaching Americans how to make a proper cup of tea or giving a speech about the possibility of an artificial God, Adams was able to make almost anything a pleasure to read. A wonderful insight into the mind of a man I'll never get to meet.
I'm only taking off points here because the unfinished version of the third Dirk Gently novel given here didn't quite work, but then again Adams knew that too. Shame we never got to see how this project would have ended up.
So long Douglas Adams, and thanks for all the fish.

This was a weird one for me. I started listening to this book about a year ago and hated it. Today, I unexpectedly finished another audiobook at the beginning of my drive to work. I searched my phone and found that I hadn't deleted The Salmon of Doubt yet. Begrudgingly, I started it over.

I had a completely different reaction today. I thought it was hilarious. I thought the essays/Articles were great. There was one about the inevitable random cords that people end up collecting that was especially poignant for me, as I purged my cord collection last month.

I don't always agree with the Essays, but even the ones that I didn't were still entertaining and well thought out.

The main event, so to speak, of the book was the first nine chapters of what would have been the third Dirk Gently book. I wasn't a fan of the first two. At all. This one was shaping up to be really good. His death robbed us of what would have been a great book.

I don't know why I didn't get into the book on my first attempt, but it may force me to reconsider a few other books that I didn't like.

Readers beware: The Salmon of Doubt is not a single novel, but rather a collection of goods pulled from Adams' computer after his death--including a draft of the first few chapters of his next Dirk Gently story (also titled The Salmon of Doubt, thus the larger part of this collection's title). Also enclosed in this volume are a series of short stories, essays, travelogues, and other random snippets, some of which date back over a decade, and most of which have little to do with the next entry, except they were all written by Adams.

How, then, to review this book? How does one go about commenting on a collection of miscellanea the author never intended to exist in single-volume form? How does one offer criticism on a draft of an unfinished novel? Indeed, how does one offer any insight into a bricolage of material that, pessimistically, smacks of the publishing industry's frantic attempts to make one last posthumous dollar off of a popular writer?

I answer through a personal narrative. Any review ever published is, of course, subjective. This one is more so than even most. There's your grain of salt.

My wife bought me this book for my birthday, and I took it with me when I flew home (alone; my wife wasn't able to accompany me) the next week to visit my parents. I read the entire book in one day as I shuffled between airplanes and ticket counters, fast-food stands and uncomfortable plastic seats. Much of what appeared in Salmon... was completely new to me, as I'd somehow never read Adams' shorter works--only his novels. But in short, I was both entranced and maddened: the former at the brilliant intelligence and humor that marble-streaked its way through the pages; the latter at the frustratingly incomplete Dirk Gently novel (imagine if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had only written the first half of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" before suddenly perishing, or if Shakespeare had never completed "Romeo and Juliet"). I saw in Salmon... sides of Adams both familiar to me, as in his intelligent satire, and unfamiliar, as in the extemporaneous and atheistic speech he delivered at Cambridge, sections of which forced me to close the cover temporarily while I pondered my own thoughts about the nature of God. Most importantly, through all of these scattered scribblings I saw the inner workings of a man who truly, admirably loved life. And as I turned the last page and stared helplessly at the blank sheet before me, and realized that I had just read the last "book" Adams would ever "publish," I was overcome with a sadness so deep and painful that I've never yet been able to even pull Salmon... off of the shelf again, much less read it.

Douglas Adams never knew I existed: we never met, exchanged correspondence, or even caught a glimpse of one another in a crowded airport. Yet I consider this man one of my dearest mentors, a man whose writing has shaped the last fifteen years of my life in areas too varied and extensive to number. How then to review a book like this? Simply put, I can't. I'm too close. Even now, five years after the only time I managed to read Salmon..., and six years after Adams' death, I'm too close.

Why, then, do I give this book five stars?

How could I not?

Douglas Adams’ final, only-half-finished book, with copious bonus features. The half-finished book is a Dirk Gently story, the first one I’ve read, but it’s so good it makes me want to read the others. The 200 pages of bonus essays, short stories, and interviews is well worth it just for the way Adams strings words together. Maybe not an essential read for everybody, but I enjoyed the heck out of it.

It's really hard to rate a text that is a compilation of snippets that was intended to eventually be a book, but that the author never completed.

This reliquary is constructed of some well-not-quite-eulogies of Douglas Adams, and some quotes, snippets and letters that he wrote and some of his magazine articles. The entire first half of the book comes across as a portrait of a man we have come to know through his work, with some semi-biographical pieces such as his time spent in the America walking borrowed dogs, his passion for The Beatles and Procol Harum, his thoughtful journey into Atheism, and that time he dressed up as a Rhino to climb Kilimanjaro. I was fully amused to listen to his wish-lists for future technology, that spookily predict many aspects our modern day mobile cloud-computing world and fibre optic networks, even though they were written in the 90s.

Bumbling into the more Dirk Gently end of the book, I was amused to find myself listening to the voice of Arthur Dent, Simon Jones. Having been brought up on Hitchhiker's Guide (TV and radioplay versions) this seemed quite fitting. I'll admit that knowing this was ostensibly a Dirk Gently book, I should have at first considered... "the interconnectedness of all things". I was caught off guard with a frisson of real honest to goodness goosebumps as random descriptions in the text tied back to other anecdotes, turns of phrase and backstory from Adams's life. Either that or I was just cold... gusty winds may exist.

I'm not sure how this would go down with people who are not fans of the author, but the book is a nice quiet farewell to the man.

This makes a good case for NOT publishing everything found around the house after an otherwise-brilliant author kicks the bucket.

A posthumous collection of writing recovered from Douglas Adams’s various Apple computers, plus 11 chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel. I preferred the earlier essays and fragments. But the Dirk Gently stuff is quite interesting because it’s a sequel to The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. It has provided me with further oxygen and direction for my Douglas Adams deep-dive.

Douglas Adams was brilliant—and it pains me to have to put that in the past tense. His novel-in-progress, The Salmon of Doubt, was cut short by Adams' untimely death in 2001. But this posthumous collection of miscellany from his computer's hard drive, also called The Salmon of Doubt, showcases Adams' brilliance, and is a worthy addition to his canon.

There's not much of the planned novel here—just a few chapters, and that's not what impressed me most about this collection anyway. The things that amazed me most about The Salmon of Doubt were: first, the breadth and depth of Adams' interests, as revealed here particularly in his discussions of Last Chance to See, written with Mark Carwardine, a serious attempt to document and, perhaps, even save some of Earth's vanishing species. And, second, the evidence of Adams' prescience when it came to computing and the Internet. Far from being just a comedic writer, the interviews and excerpts included here show clearly that Adams had his finger on the pulse of the Internet, more so than many self-acclaimed pundits and insiders. He foresaw the importance of wirelessness, for example, and the utility of thumbs for texting, well before such things were common knowledge.

The Salmon of Doubt isn't a complete novel, and never will be now—and that is tragic. But The Salmon of Doubt is one last amazing glimpse into Adams' mind, and for that I am grateful.