I finished re-reading one of my favourite books, '
High Fidelity' by
Nick Hornby, just a few days ago. It was an enjoyable experience. The book is written in a very engaging way. The main character, Rob, talks to the reader throughout the book, which makes the reader part of the action and puts them right inside the story; the reader is not a mere observer. Apart from the writing style, I find the story quite interesting because it is about a
modern (read: unrealised) quest for happiness, even though (surely) not explicitly defined that way. We live in a society where having a job we like and a partner we like are a few of the necessary 'requirements' for us to be happy. Clearly, having 'requirements' for happiness is right where the quest is doomed to failure, because things in the outside world get depleted, used out, we get tired of them, etc, i.e. are subject to disappearance in one form or the other. As
Mr. Ricard points out in his
TED talk
on happiness, real happiness (not to be mistaken with pleasure) is best sought inside. I've
blogged about this before, so I will refrain from going into it again.. (can't hide that it's a favourite topic of mind though :-) Anyway, because of these reasons, the reader never really sees Rob finishing his quest, we rather see him content with his life and not necessarily feeling joyous about it. Maybe in the next book?
It'd be cool to see him go to a Buddhist hermitage for a while... maybe an interesting story could come out of this too :-)
In line with the book environment, my top five favourite moments from 'High Fidelity':
#1: "'Have you got any soul?' a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues." (p.67)
I like the pun :-), especially with the blues.
#2: "The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windscreen wipers when they're driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven't heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, 'Happy Go Lucky Girl' by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental." (p.83)
Life, jobs.. it's what we make of them. As a records salesperson, someone might just be sitting on a chair and popping gum, another will be having thoughts like the ones above.. Put your heart into it and it makes all the difference and I love this difference. (Although in only later in the book we see Rob sort of realising that he actually likes his job.)
#3: "It's just that none of us had the wit or the talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which is much messier, and more time-consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle." (p.111)
I like the phrasing of this one. This sentence appears when a singer tells Rob about a popular song, whose lyrics tell a story of a popular singer and his girlfriend.
And these are some interesting uses of countries:
#4: "It's only beginning to occur to me that it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn't seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does." (p.67)
#5: "I'm starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can't remember anything good about him at all." (p.64)
I will leave those two without a comment ;-)
PS: About the book: 1996 Indigo Edition
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