High Fidelity Paperback – August 1, 1996

I have probably read this book three times before and it always makes me laugh. Glad I finally got a copy for my phone. It’s in my top five favorite books.

Rob Fleming would be pushing 50 today, a sobering thought for those of us who delighted in his arrested adolescence as presented in "High Fidelity", Nick Hornby's 1995 breakout novel."I want to go back to 1979 and start all over again", is how Rob puts it to us late in the story, and it's not just bell-bottom nostalgia he's thinking of - though you do get that, in a hilariously sent-up way. Its the menu of options that have since become closed to him, especially regarding love. Rob has just been ditched by his latest love, and he spends the first thirty pages going back to his youth recalling past dumping dames from his first kiss to his last roll in the hay.He also is stuck in a dead-end job, selling old LPs at a tiny North London store called Championship Vinyl, where most of his day is spent listening to his two employees argue over whether the Righteous Brothers or Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels did the better version of "Little Latin Lupe Lu". If you care anything at all about pop music and its various offshoots over the last 50 years, you will find plenty of recognition comedy in "High Fidelity". For others, the send-up of nerdy one-upsmanship translates easy enough for laughter.For most people, "High Fidelity" the book will be used to compare with "High Fidelity" the movie. The latter is a good one, definitely making my Top Five All Time John Cusack Movies list, but I wonder if the novel will similarly be on my Top Five Nick Hornby Novels in a few years' time. Not that "High Fidelity" isn't splendid company - it just goes on for a while longer than it needs to, and its narration seems a bit self-aware for someone whose life is supposed to be such a mess. Suffice it to say I don't want women thinking Rob is a typical male loser - he's a little too clever and sympathetic.The novel does score points over the movie in some departments - Rob visits his parents in one chapter, and gets roped into a neighbor's wine party that brings out his self-pitying best. At one point, dragged to see a movie, he sees another young man in a similar predicament. The young man smiles sheepishly at Rob, who struggles to swallow down his disgust.That gets at the heart of the message of "High Fidelity", that Rob's problem is one of snobbish selfishness, a desire to see himself as too important to accept the reality of his life for what it is. His relationship with ex Laura is not one of bitter feelings, but a dim sense of being cooped up by social expectations. Finding his way past his own narrow sense of self-satisfaction is the novel's central struggle, and its source of light. It's a common theme with Hornby - the main character in "About A Boy" later on will also need to get past his ideal of "island living" to find what it is about life that's really worth living for.I like the message well enough. What I like more are the snappy one-liners. Maybe there's too many of them, and maybe Laura feels a bit too much like an echo of Rob's narration. But Hornby's often-unremarked gift for plot structure is well in evidence, and try not being entertained by it all the first time round."I get letters from young men, always young men, in Manchester and Glasgow and Ottawa, young men who seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and "ORIGINAL NOT RERELEASED" underlined Frank Zappa albums," Rob says of his clientele. "They're as close to being mad as makes no difference."Paying Rob a call may seem mad to him, but it makes a whole lot of sense where "High Fidelity" is concerned.

This is a good read. I wanted to read this because I loved the movie version starring John Cusak and Jack Black. I was surprised to find the the book's narration takes place in England and not the USA, but the characters are even more entertaining than in the movie.The writing is insightful, and as you read you can feel with the character as he recovers from a lost love and experiences the joy and uncertainty of finding it again. I have always enjoyed books that make me think about my own life because I identify with the characters, and this book does the trick. You will feel joy, uncertainty, a lover's sorrow, and also gain insight into some of life's major events. I have the book on my Kindle Fire, and I have highlighted about 30 passages to reread and think about. This is one of the rare books that you will want to read a second time.If you are a music lover, you will also gain some great musical insights, and quite a few new songs to audition, just by reading the dialogue.Highly recommended!

I decided to give this book a read after seeing the excellent John Cusack film for the second time (and shame on you if you haven't seen it!). I wasn't sure what to expect of the novel, knowing as I did that, among other things, Cusack and director Stephen Frears had taken the liberty of relocating the story from London to Chicago. What other things might have been messed with?Not much, as it turns out. Never in the history of book-to-film translations (with the possible exception of Fight Club) have there been fewer alterations and deviations from the novel than in the case of High Fidelity. This is aided, of course, by the fact that the book, in trade paperback, consists of a slim 323 double-spaced pages. The end result is that in the film, no important scenes are omitted, and hardly any characters got the axe either. The flip side of the coin is that the book, as fiction, is a bit of a light lunch. Like the movie, the novel is narrated by Rob, the beleaguered owner of one of those wonderful out-of-the-way (translation: customer-free) used record stores, this one being named Championship Vinyl. After being abandoned by his pretty and smart girlfriend Laura for an aging, hawaiian-shirt- and ponytail-sporting, incense-burning New Age hipster named Ian, the perplexed Rob - who thinks in Billboard-style lists - goes on to tell us the stories behind his "all-time desert island top five" breakups, while in the present day desperately trying to win back his skeptical ex. Comedy ensues.This sort of story's been done before, of course, but one of the neat little twists is the tour Hornby gives us of the musical culture, where respect is earned by stumping people with encyclopedic knowledge of bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, and the undisguised contempt that the music elite, like the elites of all niche groups, express towards the everyday civilian. The pop culture at large permeates every facet of High Fidelity - certain passages don't make much sense unless you know what Rob means when he says, for instance, that someone reminds him of a character from Reservoir Dogs. This, of course, makes the book very much a novel of the 1990s - probably not something to be read twenty or thirty years from now - but unlike similar name-dropping books and movies, this novel is introspective about its own inseparable connection to the transitory. And this cuts to the heart of Rob's problems, because he's let the worship of the impermanent take over his life. "Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable," he muses, "or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?" Like all mass-culture junkies, Rob mourns for the loss of old favorites while simultaneously trying to get his hands on the next big thing. So it is with his love life.Rob could easily come off as a narcissistic jerk, but Hornby neatly pulls off the trick of making us see where he's been sabotaging his relationships with women with sympathy rather than scorn. And the mistakes Rob makes are the mistakes that many men have made, though perhaps not so hilariously. The book is short (another way of putting it, of course, is that it never outstays its welcome) and full of suitably quotable lines. The London setting really makes no difference to the story one way or another (though the British school system continues to confound me: for a while I was under the impression that the "sixth form" was akin to our sixth grade, and thus was in for a shock when Rob's youthful counterpart began indulging in heavy petting). As a comedy, High Fidelity is excellent, though as literature it's basically junk food; but for the eight or ten hours I was reading the book, I was fully under its spell. If we're being honest, how many other books can we say that about? I don't want to seem like I'm damning with faint praise: good comedy is harder by far than it looks, and even rarer is a book that leavens the humor with thoughtful characterization and crisp prose.

So I saw the movie first when it came out - the 2000 John Cusack one - and loved it. Then I read the book and realized the movie was half as good as this thing - still great, and up to about the 90% mark a terrific adaptation (it needed to be about 15 minutes longer), but this book is so much better.Last year I watched the show, an updated & gender & color flipped version, and IT was terrific, but still not as great as this book.

Muito bom. Livro altamente impactante e realista. entrega rapida, por um valor justo.

Hilarante por momentos, te mantiene pegado a la lectura. Muy buenas recomendaciones musicales e historia de amor-desamor.

Nick Hornby beschreibt Menschen, die kurios, liebeswert, oder auch abschreckend sind, aber immer glaubhaft. Obwohl es (wie in anderen Büchern von ihm) keinen im einfachen Sinne spannenden Handlungsstrang gibt, hat die Erzählung einen intensiven Sog, der einen mitreist, wenn man sich auf den Hauptcharakter einlässt. Er braucht keine Klischees, keine positiv oder negativ überhöhten "Guten" oder "Bösen". Man erkennt die Handschrift und Grundzüge seiner Geschichten, aber wenn man sie einem Genre zuordnen müsste, dann wäre es ein Genre für sich (was natürlich ein Widerspruch ist).

Rapidez y servicio

Perché non lo avevo ancora letto, non me lo so spiegare. È il terzo libro che leggo di Hornby, è il mio preferito. Fresco nello stile colloquiale, un personaggio ironico, a tratti irriverente nei confronti del lettore, vero, sincero, credible e mai banale. Ho riso tanto. Fa riflettere sulle relazioni di coppia, partendo dalla quotidianità, le manie, i loop mentali e le paure che hanno un po' tutti, ma che pochi osano confessare. E nessuno lo sa fare in modo così efficace e sorprendente, come il protagonista. Lo rileggerò, di certo, nel frattempo lo consiglio!