High Fidelity (1995) (edit title/settings)

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

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• Rob Fleming: Protagonist, who runs a record shop and is obsessed with his record collection.
• Barry: Coworker and friend of Rob's.
• Dick: Coworker and friend of Rob's.
• Laura: Rob's most current ex-girlfriend/girlfriend.
• Liz: Rob's ex-girlfriends best friend.
• Ian (Ray): An old neighbour of Laura and Rob.
• Marie Lasalle: An American singer living in London. "Marie is pretty, in that nearly cross-eyed American way -she looks like a slightly plumper, post - Partridge Family pre-L.A. Law Susan Day--and if your going to develop a spontaneous and pointless crush on someone you could do a lot worse"

Quotes edit see section history

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• “We were twelve or thirteen, and had recently discovered irony--or at least, what I later understood to be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the swings and the round-about and the other kids' stuff rusting away in there if we could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment.”

• “We're no longer called Sonic Death Monkey. We're on the verge of becoming Kathleen Turner Overdrive, but just for tonight, we are Barry Jive and his Uptown Five.”

  Barry

• “I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits and the exit sign.”

• “It's not a case of the glass being half-full or half-empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.”

• “People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.”

  Rob

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• People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

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• Maybe we all live life 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.

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• sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.

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• What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

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• You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.

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• the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

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• My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame.

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• I can see everything once it’s already happened—I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.

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• (You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. “Look at me! I’m not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!” Tragic. I’m glad I learned to stay home and sulk.)

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• Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• London
• States
• Camden
• White Lion
• England

First Sentence edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Male Sexuality: Describe this theme.
• sex, romance and love
• Music
• Quarterlife Crisis
• Love and relationships

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and followed by It.

Preceded by Cry, the Beloved Country, and followed by The Van.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Nick Hornby (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Maria Augusta Júdice (Translator)
2. Neusa Dias (Cover Artist)
3. Rui Miguens Almeida

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• BBC's Big Read (April 2003, #143)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 823.914

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( H ) › Hornby, Nick
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

Movie Connections edit see section history

• High Fidelity (IMDb): Stephen Frears, 2000

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history