When You Feel “Alien” in the Human World: A Review of Matt Haig’s “The Humans”

This book deserved a picture before it deserved a review.

If you don’t like spoilers, jump to paragraph eight.

At first, when I saw this book, I got nothing in mind but felt called by its title, ‘The Humans.’ My mind got stuck with some questions. What does this book can offer? Something like the anatomy of the human body parts? Something about human behavior? And other basic questions. I pulled this book out of the shelf with zero expectations and no hints. I always like that better, not reading the synopsis cause I love when it surprises me with its writing. I brought it to my comfort sitting zone, and that’s it. I started to read something I will soon call a masterpiece.

So this book was about an alien. Yes, an alien. But why its titled ‘The Humans’ when the story is not talking about humans, but instead, an alien? This is the interesting part. It’s actually a story of humans, from the point of view of an alien who lives far away from Earth. The no named alien knew nothing about the creature called human. He was pure, like a baby that was just born into the Earth. A baby that was trapped in a forty-something-year-old human body.

The no named alien was in the body of a dead human, who was killed by his alien clan. The body was belonged to a mathematician professor in Cambridge. He had something called ‘Riemann Hypothesis’ in mathematics, which would change the life of all humans. It is about prime numbers, like a pattern of them. That pattern, which sounds simple, is believed will change the entire human century. If we want to compare, it’s like the first humans going to the moon was in Isaac Newton’s or Albert Einstein’s era.

It’s of course, something amazingly big that humans can achieve. So the alien believed that humans were still not ready for it. There will be a time when they can go to that big change, but not now. Not this time. That’s it, when the no named alien was sent by his ‘boss’ to do a mission: to remove all of the proof of that hypothesis. All of it should be gotten rid of. Even if the proof was in a living human’s brain, it should gone within that life.

The mission could have succeeded, it should have. But it ended up with the no named alien sacrificing his life to become a hundred percent human, with zero alien left in his body. And it was all because of something called emotions, the thing he never had in his entire life. He was once a pure creature, with no emotions. And now he had been craving all of them: the happiness, the sadness, the madness, when he felt the thing called love.

He was pure, thought his home was far miles away from this galaxy, but now, he found his home in humans. The humans that he loves for their emotions. The humans that he admires for their complexities. The humans that can’t be understood by the hardest mathematical formulas. The humans that he will sacrifice everything for, just to not lose them.

He was pure, like all of us when we were babies. Knowing nothing about being a human. A simple creature, with almost similar details; crying when we are hungry, crying when we poop, crying when we get shocked. But now, we are the creatures that full of different complexities. Some of us might cry when they get mad, and others might stay silent. Some of us wants to be popular, and others want some privacy. Some of us need company, and others need aloneness.

This book, more or less, reminded me of some human details of me that I can’t even notice. Some parts of me that I might be missing and never done to understand. This book gave me some insight: that to live is to feel the emotions, to live is to know all the layers of us, to live is to admire all of the complexities that we have, and to live is to feel that we have to work to stop ourselves from feeling lonely, at least for me.

This book kinda taught me that humans are complex creatures that can’t be solved even with the most logical truth in the world: mathematics. It will always be complex in different layers. It needs different solutions from one human to another.

It’s awesome, isn’t it, that God created humans in endless different layers that even their maximal brain capacity can never think of?

So yeah, I think that statement — or maybe a question for some of you — closes my yap for this book. I call it a masterpiece because this is the first book that made me write like this again after a long time, and which in the middle of my thesis writing, works, and all of my ‘world’ things.

Oh, don’t worry, there are at least 97 pieces of advice in the book that will help your alien feelings become more human.