A novel by
Nick Hornby, turned into a movie starring the ever lovely
John Cusack. I saw the movie first and enjoyed it, and just started reading the book. I'm
sick, though, so I'm halfway through it in less than a day.
The lovely thing I'm seeing now is that the movie stayed almost completely and perfectly
faithful to the spirit of the book. Not all of the facts and not all of the details. But the voice is the same, the
self-deprecating humor, and the reams and reams of names of old recording acts no one has ever heard of.
And the strange little bits of
poignancy that make the hairs stand up on your neck because they're so goddam true, thrown in
helter-skelter amongst the silly bits, so you never, ever expect them:
"It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything else that makes you feel) at the centre of your being , then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it and unravel it all until it comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized."
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, Riverhead Books, New York, 1996. Page 138-9.
If you liked the movie, go get the book. It's fun. And British. Everybody loves British slang.