The Humans: Matt Haig

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A quark is not the smallest thing. The wish you have on your death-bed – to have worked harder – that is the smallest thing. Because it won’t be there.

The narrator decides to give some advice to fellow humans and comes up with some cliched (yet wise) gems. A selection: Haig, Matt (14 July 2018). "Matt Haig on Newark-on-Trent: 'I didn't know where I wanted to escape to. Anywhere would do' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 12 June 2023. Haig’s unexpectedly raw tale of love, belonging, and peanut butter… It’s funny, clever and quite, quite lovely. Sam Baker, The Sunday Times The Truth Pixie Goes to School (Canongate Books, 2019) illustrated by Chris Mould LCCN 2020-476813 ISBN 9781786898265

I am always torn with Haig's work, it reads and feels like a top quality Hallmark movie, but always gives me the sense of trying too hard to be such. If I was really being honest and removed Haig's name from the book I would have to say that this is an illuminating and thought provoking read that tries to at least look at the big questions of why we are here, what do we want and how we should live wrapped up in a truly innovative 'the aliens are here' story set around an academic family in a university city/town. Gots to be at least an 8 out o f12, Four Star read, Goddamn you Haig, no matter how hard I resist, I have to give you props. In his communications with his home world, our narrator is persistently reminded not to think of the humans as individuals but as a collective. Why is this so important to the hosts? What is so dangerous about thinking of humans as individuals? What does this emphasis say about Vonnadorian culture? He still does not understand the concept of sexual betrayal. He tells Isabel that he has had sex (without love) with a student who had asked for it. She reacted furiously, says he really is an alien to her, and doesn’t listen when he says he really had been just that. She wants a divorce, and demands that he leaves the house – which he does.

This is a book I can see myself returning to again and again. I love it! Curiosity Killed The BookwormElements of Haig's book, for me, evoked the recent bone-chiller Under the Skin (with Scarlett Johansson and directed by Jonathan Glazer), an indelible, abstruse piece about an alien that inhabits the body of a beautiful woman and proceeds to bump off unwitting natives in rural Scotland. The two are uncannily similar – and Glazer's novel predates both Haig's creation and the movie, naturally – but The Humans has, as the title suggests, a more human touch. Haig's unexpectedly raw tale of love, belonging, and peanut butter . . . Funny, clever and quite, quite lovely And for a while, as Matt Haig builds from this premise, it’s funny! The Humans begins quite wonderfully with the arrival of an alien who can barely disguise his contempt towards humans and believes clothing is optional. The humor works because of our extraterrestrial narrator's terrific voice, which is matter of fact and superior. For example, the first piece of “literature” he reads is an issue of Cosmopolitan, which leads to this pithy discussion of magazines: Magazines are very popular, despite no human’s ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next. It is an eternal and unhappy spiral that goes by the name of capitalism, and it is really quite popular. I would have liked an entire book of this: just a doofy alien in human form walking around the modern world trying—and failing—to make sense of it.