Saturday 19 November 2011

Reclaim High Fidelity!


With Christmas closing (and man, I love Christmas) I’m at the stage where I’m not allowed to read any new books. Not from the library, certainly not from the bookshops, on the chance that they’re already pegged to be bought for a present. Inevitably this leads to rereading one of the house-full of lovingly tatty paperbacks I possess and for no reason other than they were there I’ve hit up a couple of Nick Hornby.
Fever Pitch was mentioned here recently and then just now and here’s High Fidelity. The boy’s tale of record shop owner Rob making lists and enjoying vinyl, grumpily entering middle age and... hang on though, if you don’t skip bits it seems to actually be about relationships. Not boy’s relationships either, but miserable ones, looking-back ones, ones to do with shoes, or should be. And holy crap, High Fidelity’s a bloody girl’s book! Having been dumped by his girlfriend Rob after a lot more looking back on past relationships than is necessary in a book about records – it is about records isn’t it – embarks on a brief affair with a beautiful and cool folk singer. Job done you’d think. No, no, boys would still then yearn for...
...records. There, fixed it.
I’m scared now what’ll happen if I pick up Robert Llewellyn’s Thin He Was And Filthy Haired? Or that Tony Parson’s Stories We Could Tell won’t be about the transition from prog to punk and one hectic night at all – but instead be about some Daily Mail journo whose about-as famous former wife leaves him and...
Gah! Stop it.
The Great Escape is on.
Why are they talking about Prada, on camels, and why does Dickie Attenborough now look like a dying woman, with a face, like a foot?  

2 comments:

  1. I can't find my copy of High Fidelity at the moment to check, but I'm liking the way you've turned around a quote (possibly just from the film) where the main character says of 'Love in the Time of Cholera', "it's about chicks, right?"

    I need to read the Robert Llewellyn book you mention, now, and I presume it's about comics...

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  2. It's about Mr. Ll age 16 having dropped out as a hippie in 1970s Oxford - nine or ten years before being a stand up, thence Krighton. It's good, honest, but mostly it's well written in that mostly it reminds of how knobby it is to be 16, but also a little bit noble too. I enjoyed it.

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