High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

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Extract
Synopsis
Reviews
Product details
Interview

About Nick Hornby

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High Fidelity

» Nick Hornby

Penguin
Paperback : 05 Oct 2000

£7.99

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Read an extract from: High Fidelity

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Synopsis

When Laura dumps Rob (on the very first page) he is aggrieved and exhilarated, 35 and petrified. Trying to work out what went wrong, obsessed with music, and running an ailing record shop, he sets out on the road to self-discovery.

Nick Hornby's first novel, an international bestseller and instantly recognized by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music: he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what isn't. But he's much less good on relationships. In fact, he's not at all sure that he wants to commit himself to anyone. So it's hardly surprising that his girlfriend decides that enough is enough.

The Carte Noire Readers
Watch a video of Dominic West reading an extract from High Fidelity.

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Reviews

Customer Review: 03 August 2003

Reviewer: Alexander Anderson

Is that me in that book? Especially fun to read when you're single...it helps to get a little hostility...it even makes you feel as if the book is a friend helping you through your relationships problems

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Critic Review:

'Reading High Fidelity is like listening to a great single. 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. If this book was a record, we would be calling it an instant classic. Because that's what it is'
Suzanne Moore, Guardian

'Leaves you believing not only in the redemptive power of music but above all the redemptive power of love. Funny and wise, sweet and true'
Mick Brown, Independent

'The most frequent response to High Fidelity is "Oh God, I know people just like that!" His characters are truly archtypes, culled from sources and brilliantly reconstituted so that they evoke facets of many, many different friends and relationships'
Elizabeth Young, Guardian

'Very funny and extremely cleverly observed'
William Leith, Mail on Sunday

'Funny, compulsive and contemporary'
John Williams, GQ

'Brilliant ... a very funny and concise explanation of why men are as we are'
Harry Enfield, Independent on Sunday

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Interview

Penguin.co.uk: In High Fidelity one of the issues I suppose is whether music, that kind of thing, enables one to live life better or whether it's actually a retreat.
NH: One of the reasons I wanted to write High Fidelity was that I wanted to write from the point of view of a narrator who didn't have any of the hindsight that I was able to have in Fever Pitch. There seems to be more drama in somebody who is trying to make up his mind all the time and failing, and there's more potential for comedy.

In About a Boy, I think it is quite clear that Will is 'retarded' by popular culture. The kind of things he listens to and the kind of stuff he does is trivial. Whereas I think Rob in High Fidelity has got some soul, and his relationship with the music is quite soulful, but his relationship with other people is all over the place.

Round about the time I was writing Fever Pitch the publisher I now have at Penguin said he didn't feel that it did him any good. He read these manuscripts all day, and they were all about life and death, and he listened to great music in the car, going to and from work, and he felt that art gave him too much intensity. In a way Rob's job in High Fidelity is a trope, if you like, for writing. He listens to very raw stuff all day and it probably doesn't do you any good. I think over the last 10 to 20 years we've all had much more opportunity, more leisure time, and there's certainly more stuff around in terms of radio and TV, so I think we have a slightly distorted sense of what life is.

P: Do you think it's a particularly male thing to try and find metaphors for life rather than life itself?
NH: The male/female thing is interesting because when I wrote Fever Pitch and High Fidelity I presumed I was speaking on behalf of males to females. But particularly with High Fidelity the response I have had from readers has made me think that actually the gender thing doesn't apply anymore. There are an awful lot of women who responded to High Fidelity in what I would have previously thought of as a male way.

P: As a male reader I thought that phenomena - of collecting, arranging, listing - is a very male thing, but you think not?
NH: I think that the categorisation of things is maybe more male than female, but I think that the things women responded to in High Fidelity were more about just feeling messed up generally and clinging onto music or books as a way of getting through. Women who read the book seemed to look past that and look at Rob as a lost soul and identify with him because of that.

P: How should we read the ending of High Fidelity?
NH: The way I intended the ending was that it had the form of one of those old rock and roll films. At Rob's party he DJs and everyone gets together and dances. It has the feel of a happy ending, but I'd always intended for it to be very doubtful, and that Rob had taken the first tiny step on a road to something. It didn't necessarily mean that everything was going to work out, particularly in the relationship.

P: What did you think of the film of High Fidelity?
NH: I really liked it. What I liked most was that the film was personal to the filmmakers in the same way that the book was personal to it's writer: they grew up in Chicago, where the film was set, and they are all music addicts. So it became a film about them, which is the best sort of adaptation. People kept asking me about the transposition to the US, but it meant that the book retained all it's best features.