High Fidelity : Nick Hornby

                                                 Image Credit: StoneBrown
Ok, here I am. A Sunday evening. Desperately pleased. And relieved. Relief. Overwhelming relief. Because I somehow managed to trudge through Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. This book is either a hit or a miss, going by the reviews on the net. It was definitely a miss for me.

Why, just the other day, Birdy, Thoughts and I were praising the male species - we were thinking how well ordered and logical and uncomplicated the male mind is compared to ours. Birdy and Thoughts : we were wrong! So very wrong! If I were to go by Rob Fleming, the main character in High Fidelity, then I have full freedom to call myself, this chaotic mass of jumbled thoughts in forever disarray, as the simplest, most logical mind of them all.

Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, Nick Hornby tries his best to give us a glimpse into the male psyche. The obvious cliches are there - when Rob's ex-girlfriend Laura moves in with Ian, of course, the predominant thought in Rob's mind is : is he better, is he better, is he better? Don't ask me at what. This is the male mind we are talking about! He certainly is not asking if Ian is the better cook. So Rob gets dumped by Laura. It prompts him to embark on this journey into the past - his 5 former girlfriends and how they have all conspired to make him into this commitment-phobic, neurotic, and dare I say it, jerk. That's where I didn't like the book. I didn't like Rob at all. He is too much of a music snob, sleeps around even as he gets irritated that his Laura is doing the same thing, and generally is not the guy I would like to bump into at the next party.

So when you start disliking the main character in the book, would you blame me much if I didn't like the book? High Fidelity was made into a movie that starred John Cusack. Something tells me that, for a change, the movie must have been better than the book.

Verdict: Read at your own discretion. 


Rating: 1/5