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3.5 Stars

n  n    I’d like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I’m not born to run, I know that the Seven Sisters’ Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can’t be so different, can they?n  n

n  n

When Rob’s live-in girlfriend walks out on him, he’s left questioning all of his relationships and what led up to this point.

When I first read High Fidelity umpteen years ago, I thought it was a home run. Grand slam, even. Nick Hornby was new to the writing scene and British and young and British and had fresh material and was British and wrote hip characters (that were British) and I was smitten. Now that I’m old and jaded (and not as easily impressed by all things from across the pond), this re-read wasn’t quite the home run it was the first time around. It was more like a double with an error that allowed the runner to advance to third.*

However . . . My appreciation for Hornby’s talent will not allow me to rate any of his books below 3.5 Stars, I have nothing but admiration for his ability to write “anti-love stories,” and my adoration for Rob, the MC, remains strong. I believe High Fidelity may have provided me my first experience of being 100% annoyed by the narrator and so happy to not know him in real life, while still wanting to hear his story and being fascinated by his crybabiness (made up word??? yep, I'm going with it) rather than wanting to kick his ass.

n  n

Yes, Rob, you are indeed, but somehow Hornby always makes characters like you work.

Book version recommended to? The recently dumped or pessimists in general.

Movie version recommended to? Anyone who likes John Cusack films. While you won’t get a moment like this:

n  n

Rob Gordon’s whining is significantly tuned down and Jack Black shines as co-star.

*After spending what seems like an eternity at various little league parks, my apologies for the baseball terminology.

Oh yeah. An easy five stars. Laugh out loud funny, painfully true, insightful look at a man-boy’s road to maturity. Review to come, after I sample some of his Top 5 song suggestions on Spotify.

Every once in a while a writer will strike literary gold with a character whose popularity reaches iconic levels. I can think of a few offhand: Mary Poppins, Forrest Gump, Pippi Longstocking.

We've all encountered these iconic characters before; some are distinctly regional, others manage worldwide fame (even a remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest would probably recognize Audrey Hepburn in her famous guise of Holly Golightly).

But I don't know if I've ever encountered before what I discovered here in High Fidelity: a writer who created a character who went on to become a proper noun.

A Rob.

A Rob. . . is a man who has a job, but not a career.
A Rob. . . is a playful, passionate man, which lends him an irresistible charm.
A Rob. . . is great for a snog, as he has nothing but time on his hands.
A Rob. . . is terrified of commitment.
A Rob. . . is someone you shouldn't make babies with.

Ever dated a Rob?

I have. I've dated three. They're so damned adorable and they're so damned attractive in their rugby shirts. . . until you realize by the third date that it's the only shirt they own.

I once pulled up for a date with a Rob (because, naturally, he didn't have his own car), and he was sitting on the hood of a friend's car in a rugby shirt and sweat pants, his right forearm down to the elbow in a Jumbo size bag of Doritos. As I stopped my car, my headlights shone upon his visage, and he smiled a cheesy, Cheshire grin. God bless him, he was so happy to see me, but when he licked his orange fingertips as he walked over to my car, I will admit, here, publicly, that I pressed on the accelerator and drove off gently into that good night. (That was Rob #1).

A Rob. . . will sometimes call you for as long as 10 years after your break-up.
A Rob. . . will always love you more, after you've left him.
A Rob. . . will often entice you back for a snog at least one more time after you've officially declared you're done with him. (Sometimes twice, depending upon the Rob).

A Rob can break your heart with their fear of. . . everything. Including you.

To all Robs everywhere, this one goes out to you:

He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

High Fidelity is a novel about breaking up and growing up. It’s often described as chick-lit for men, but it’s also a sort of YA for people approaching middle age. It’s full of a kind of cynical, self-deprecating humour; a self-indulgent wallowing in one’s own inadequacies, which at times can become a little overbearing. But there is a lot of honesty too, and a fair amount in here that resonates with my own experiences. I did end up being charmed by this novel.

Music is one of those things that can make you want to fuck up your life, especially when you are young. It feels so much more real, more important than ordinary life. It makes you want to drop out of the mainstream, start a band, or open a record shop. As someone who has often fantasised about just these things (as well as writing novels, opening a second-hand book store, the list of alternative realities goes on), I’ve always been fascinated and envious of people who have the courage to go where their heart leads them, even if it leads to something as mundane as a second-hand record store. I have always been one to favour safety and security, and take the certain rather than the unknown road. Maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for these characters. Or maybe I’m romanticising something that isn’t all that romantic to begin with. I suppose the grass is always greener.

This would probably make a pretty good movie (I know there is one, but I haven’t seen it).

Top Five Reasons to Read This Book:
1) Offers multiple opportunities to fall off your chair laughing.
2) Draws entirely convincing characters making stupid decisions and dealing with the repercussions.
3) Reminds you of all sorts of artists you must check out further.
4) Answers the "what if" questions of past relationships with horrifying clarity.
5) Satirizes but ultimately validates top-five lists.

I have not read the book, but I have seen the movie. Let me explain how much I liked it.

As things turned out, I watched it on a cross-Channel ferry travelling from Caen to Portsmouth. The trip takes about seven hours, and I was bored. I recall that I had packed Camus's La peste to read, and to my surprise I wasn't enjoying it at all. I was pleased to find that I had the option of seeing High Fidelity with Catherine Zeta-Jones, one of my favorite actresses. I paid my £3 and sat down to enjoy the next couple of hours.

Unfortunately, as often happens on this crossing, the seas were on the rough side. After a while, I found myself feeling rather queasy, but told my stomach that I wasn't paying any attention to its urgent messages. The movie was far too good to miss. Not only that, the beautiful Catherine hadn't yet turned up. But my stomach was unconvinced by these arguments and let me know that this was my final warning. If I didn't leave now, something extremely embarrassing was going to happen.

I got up, staggered to the bathroom, which luckily was right next to the theater, threw up as quickly as I could, and then rushed back. I think I only missed about three or four minutes. I then happily watched the movie to the end.

I suppose a skeptic will object that this story says nothing about Nick Hornby's novel and everything about my feelings for voluptuous brunettes called Catherine. I admit that the evidence is only anecdotal, but I submit it anyway for what it's worth. If you are able to expand my informal pre-study into a methodologically sound experiment that produces statistically significant results, I'll appreciate it if you mention me briefly in the acknowledgements section.

Thank you.

”The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most, and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.”

Rob Fleming owns a record store. We can call him Rob Fleming, but really he is John Cusack playing Rob Fleming. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve seen enough clips from the movie to know that I can’t read this book and see Fleming as anyone other than Cusack.

He is thirty-five, and his girlfriend Laura has just packed up a suitcase and moved out. This is his seventeenth relationship, and every single one of them has ended the same way...in failure. Of course, moving out with a suitcase could be just a shot across his bow. Change, or else this will be a permanent situation. The apartment, though, is still brimming with her possessions, which means there are many more skirmishes to be fought and lines in the sand to be drawn. Laura has a new job, a grown up job, and her spiked hair is gone, and her leather jackets have been pushed to the back of her closet. She has changed. Rob has remained the same.

Is this the age old problem of women wanting men to change and men wanting women to stay the same?

Or it could be about Ian, the upstairs lothario who routinely serenaded them with the squeaks and groans of his epic bouts of sex. Is Laura’s interest in Ian about curiosity? Does she want to see what all that moaning and groaning for hours is about? Rob is insecure about his sexual prowess, and thinking about Laura with Ian drives him crazy. Most men are bundles of masculine insecurities, especially regarding their sexual performance, and since Rob is a man who likes to make lists, he even has a list of all the things that can go wrong for men.

”There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn't-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank?”

Fortunately, most of the time, a man’s brain short circuits (blood flow to the mind is sent elsewhere), and he isn’t worried about any of these things at the moment of impending coitos, or there would be more failures to launch and fewer successful liftoffs. But if a man is unfortunate enough to have any of these insecurities wiggle into his brain at the most inappropriate moment, it can lead to a less than satisfactory conclusion and a doubling down on his rampaging inferiority complex.

Rob can no longer claim to be a kid, but he is far from an adult. He is trapped in an adolescent’s view of life. He’s afraid of commitment, but he flounders when he isn’t in a relationship. It becomes obvious that Laura and Rob are miserable apart, but it doesn’t take long to realize that Laura will have to be the one to take the initiative.

I worked in a bookstore that also had a record/CD/cassette department. The people who worked in the music department were definitely different than the people who worked in the book department. We each had our own language, but of course, book people listened to music, and music people read books, so we did find ways to communicate. The list challenges that Rob and his workmates throw at each other are funny because we did that as well, pre-internet by the way. We had to pull our lists from our memory, which made for errors. I’d be driving home and suddenly remember a book that should have made my list of favorite fiction books featuring a real life person and be really irritated that I forgot it.

I was just beginning to amass a book collection. Even though I had all these cheap books available to me to buy, I also had insufficient pay to buy them with, so fortunately, I didn’t have the massive library that I have today or my future wife would have certainly dumped me, smartly so, for some guy with a BMW and an obsession with the stock market, rather than sticking with a nearsighted guy obsessed with musty old books. Rob asked the age old question, ”Is it possible to maintain a relationship and a large record [book] collection simultaneously?”I can say, it is possible. I’ve been married for twenty-eight years and counting, but I would suggest a few things: don’t expect her to be as obsessed about your collection as you are, keep your collection orderly and contained (as best you can), be able to maintain conversations about things other than your collection, watch a chick flick once in a while, grit your teeth and hang out with her “normal” friends occasionally and make her look good by being charming, and make sure the money you spend on your collection doesn’t impact the normal flow of the family finances.

I know it's a mental shift from being quite willing to eat beans for a month to buy that Cormac McCarthy first edition. I can tell you, she is not willing to do so, and that is a good thing. It’s called having a more complete life.

This is one of those books that makes you grin and wince in equal measure as you read it. Rob will have you thinking about your ten most embarrassing moments while dating, and as he makes his nostalgic tour back through all the women who left him looking for insight about himself (another problem that he suffers from is self-obsession), you will remember some of your own miscues with trying to form lasting relationships. I would have really enjoyed this book when it came out in 1995. I was 28 then, a bit younger than Rob, but still working in the book biz and certainly a bit bruised and battered by the dating wars. I would have probably found Rob’s trials and tribulations more insightful than I do now, but regardless, I still enjoyed this quirky romp through a past not that dissimilar to the one I left strewn behind me.

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Bere e degustare

Se guardate nella vecchia home page Anobii vi accorgerete che uno dei libri sullo sfondo bluastro è l’azzurro - Nick Hornby ALTA (Fedeltà è tagliato)-. Che sia stato l’invito subliminale della foto a convincermi? Hornby a convincermi non c’era riuscito con i suoi libri precedenti e nemmeno con questo riesce a farmi gridare al capolavoro.
Mi sono divertito di più con l’Harry rivisto di Sarvas, il cui protagonista è un semi-coetaneo del Rob di Hornby. Harry era più scalcinato e meno pretenzioso e soprattutto io ero più giovane, più disposto ad ascoltare e ad immedesimarmi nei tormenti tardo adolescenziali. La tarda adolescenza finisce sempre più tardi, al momento attuale stabilirei la quota estrema di chiusura a 35, o forse quella era la quota degli anni ’10 e adesso è stata spostata? Fatto sta che Rob come Harry e altre decine di anti eroi prima di loro, di diventare adulti non vogliono saperne

…Sarebbe più bello se potessi sentire che ci sono ancora quelle dolci possibilità e quella sognante aspettativa che provavi a quindici anni, o a venti, o addirittura a venticinque, quando sentivi che da un momento all’altro la persona più perfetta del mondo poteva capitare nel tuo negozio, o nel tuo ufficio, o alla festa del tuo amico... sarebbe più bello se quelle emozioni fossero ancora qui, da qualche parte, nella tasca posteriore dei jeans o in fondo a un cassetto. Ma è tutto tramontato, credo, e questo sarebbe sufficiente a stizzire chiunque

Vi ricorda niente? Non depone per quella teoria secondo la quale un libro è come una persona, dipende dal momento in cui lo incontri?
Migliore di Febbre a ’90 ma come quel libro carico di riferimenti albionici, personaggi ignoti e musica mai sentita prima (di musica ce n’è davvero tanta, Rob Fleming è un ex DJ che adesso gestisce un negozio di vecchi vinili).
C’è una certa spocchia nel giudicare Simple Minds e U2 fra i peggiori gruppi mai esistiti. Forse è la quota di intellettualismo che mi disturba in Hornby che pur non avendo una scrittura greve, pur tendendo all’ironia, tiene il naso arricciato quando scrive.
Welsh si legge al pub, Hornby in un moderno Wine Bar (vineria) di quercia e cristallo. Con Welsh si tracanna con Hornby si fanno sciacqui con vino dal retrogusto di erba medica e fieno umido. La differenza che c’è fra i due scrittori è quella che passa fra bere e degustare: sono due approcci differenti alla vita, non solo al consumo.

COLONNA SONORA:
Solo per dispetto (ci saranno almeno 100 citazioni musicali), scelgo un pezzo che Rob Fleming non vorrebbe mai ascoltare:
“Sarebbe impossibile. Senti, Barry, ci sarà della gente con cui lavora Laura, gente che ha cani e bambini e album di Tina Turner. Come pensi di poterli reggere?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcm-t...

Обрав на читання тільки через раніше переглянутий фільм, і це той випадок, коли я надаю перевагу кіно натомість оригінальному тексту.
Джону Кʼюсаку вдалось наповнити свого персонажа справжніми емоціями, перетворюючи музикофільські балачки на щось приємне і тепле, а нудотно сопливі моменти у щось добре знайоме меланхолійне. Ну і як же не згадати Джека Блека, у виконанні якого Барі по-іншому годі уявити.
Кому до вподоби драми 90-х, раджу для перегляду, а книгу можна сміливо пропустити.

4.25 Stars — Oh yes, that feeling of grand nostalgia sure is a top-five emotive experience, for me that is.

I began this novel many moons ago and somehow did not finish it! Something I did regularly in my youth, a great book commencer indeed!!!

Turns out that taking the opportunity — at 230am the other night — as I scrounged through old many-multiple-home-relocations — was a smart one. For I located my copy of this classic the-one-that-got-away trope (wait, or is it more.. the classic I-hate-her-I-hate-her-I-miss-her-I-despise-her-I-love-her trope?) and I have to say it outshined even my most optimistic Nostalgic expectations.

Picturing A forlorn Cusack undoubtedly aided the process, but longing-for-Laura is such an enchanting train-wreck that is expertly written in a prose that’s befitting of the arc in a way that is hard to enunciate for some reason.

So many (literal) laugh-out-loud set pieces, an incredibly funny narrator and that magical combination with captivating images and moving passages that partner together to make those majestic-like pages!

Towards the final pages, it did begin to grind away a little slowly and feel a little ‘whiny’ but overall, the movie was a 4 star, The Novel is closer to a 4.50 Star..

While this wouldn't get near my top five reads this year, it's the best novel I'll ever read featuring top fives. Despite being written only in the mid 90s, it feels a bit dated now in the fact that independent record shops have practically been wiped out. And I don't know how the likes of HMV even manage to survive. The last time I went in a store (this before covid came along) it was almost empty and didn't have that vibe like it used to. Well, that's one thing this novel isn't lacking in, and it isn't just the music but sex and relationships too. In places when it came to the talking of sex, the movie is tame compared to the novel. Bad language too. Someone once said that reading High Fidelity is like listening to a great single where you know it's wonderful from the minute it goes on, and as soon as it's over, you want to hear it again because it makes you feel young, and grown-up, and puts a stupid grin on your face all at the same time. I've no plans to read this again straight away, but it's the sort of book that would absolutely make sense to do so. In Rob, Barry and Dick we have a trio of characters that were great to be in the company of. Together: when Barry can be bothered to get to work on time, they feverishly compile lists of top fives, from Elvis Costello songs, to episodes of Cheers, to bands that will have to be shot come the musical revolution, to name few. But the one that really matters: to Rob anyway, is that all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, brought on by his recent breakup with Laura. Made even worse by the fact she left him for the guy from the upstairs apartment. With record store owner Rob, I doubt I'll come across another character where pop culture seeps into their every sinew, and Hornby captures that lonely feeling of a recent spilt-up, as well as the childishness of adult life with such precision, that I was nodding my head far far more than shaking it. There was such an energy to this that I wish I had read it only in the mornings and not nights, as It was the the literary equivalent to a Red Bull almost. Especially when Barry was on the scene.

I've got mixed feelings about this novel. Awesome moments and annoying/displeasing moments were shared equally over the course of this story. I either really enjoyed it or completely detested it, never somewhere in between.

The main character, Rob, is whiny and rude. He can be offensive at times, primarily with regard to feminism and things of that nature. He definitely thinks he knows it all and is very self-serving. Though I do understand the selfish nature of humans, and I like that that was represented truthfully in the novel, I feel like Rob's character is an example of selfishness to an extreme. He is incredibly immature, and that element of his personality is highlighted by his relationship with Laura.

That being said, though I do not really /like/ Rob as a character, I think Hornby is pretty good at describing characters. I especially liked Dick and Barry--they were comical and believable. Despite Rob being horrible at understanding women, Hornby appears to understand them, as he writes them pretty well. I liked Laura and I like what she represented.

I am not sure what Hornby was trying to accomplish (on the whole) with this novel, other than providing a commentary about immaturity colliding with adulthood? Nothing really feels resolved at the close of the novel, and, as a result, the ending was pretty anticlimactic for me. It felt rushed.

4.5/10