Book review #46 : The Humans by Matt Haig

 

If I could share my part of the brain and let you roll around the neurons to find my best-loved genre, it would certainly be “Matt Haig”. Yes, my favorite genre, which I can pick even in my dreams to relive the whole narration again and again, is now ‘Matt Haig’. He is a genius of delivering words in the correct proportion of love and science to the world. “The Humans” is the third book of his I read, and yes-yes-yes, I loved it. 

This book is just a shooting star in the infinite prime numbers of the cosmos, existing right here and  thousands of light years  away. Matt has articulated the Earthly-AI(Artificial Intelligence) into Universal-AI(Alien Intelligence), just to understand humans - the basic intelligent form of life on the blue planet. Right from the introduction of the story, where an outsider learns to understand the umpteen forms of greeting humans can have, to the end of the story where pain and sufferings are essential-magical gifts - every thing is just a perfect example of unsupervised learning. Unsupervised learning, in a naïve language, is referred as the understanding of obvious things which are not so obvious for every species in the world. And that’s what the author has tried to deliver to the human-audience! 

Humans have the greatest gift of caring, loving, understanding, the ability to cherish music-food-poems-and-dogs, art of reading between the line and facial expressions, experiencing failures and pain and heart-breaks. And that’s exactly what has been written throughout this book in hypothetical-bold words, with screaming one liners like “Shame is shackle. Free yourself” , “It’s not the length of life that matters. It’s the depth.”, ”Ugliness is just a failure of seeing”, and more. I wanted to underline every single sentence of this book, can’t help!

The story is quite canonical, but the moral behind is “exception to the power infinity”. There’s an alien who came to the Earth on a special mission, had all the technologies available, had all the superpowers but lag behind humans on just one factor - feelings! He analyzed everything, read Emily Dickinson’s poetry, listened to all the classics, talked with a dog called Newton, ate his favorite breakfast peanut-butter-sandwich, laughed and cried, kissed and loved. And after all this, he got trapped in the world of humans, where people share emotions with closed ones, where family means a superpower itself and where existence doesn’t mean immortality. So he voluntarily lost his powers, just to be like a human.  Quite ironic, right?

The author conveyed a very powerful message to us, to understand humans, that we often forget. His writing style is quite mathematical, but very apt for relating the facts and feelings. With small gestures and incidents, he has presented many scenarios, to show where we get blinded by the success and advancements. 

So, if you are into psychology, or math, or humans - do give it a try. It will help you understand the importance of your tiniest presence in this galaxy.