Alta Fidelidad, de Nick Hornby

Alta Fidelidad by Nick Hornby

Cuánto me gustó: 5 de 5 estrellas


Do I see myself as a more intelligent person when I finish reading a book? Not at all. Do I see myself as a wiser person, a more prudent person, a more enlightened person, a better person overall when I finish reading a book? Not in the slightest. But there is something about devoting a major part of my time to stories that I want to think sets me apart from other people. And I know most compulsive readers share these feelings. I fail, though, in naming it. I just can try to describe it as a "vague notion that something is wrong", using Hornby's words. A vague notion that real life is not the way it should be. It's not simple bovarysme. It's a feeling that you are unfit for the world, but a better world exists somewhere, and it exists because stories have been told about it. Because songs have been sung about it.
In High Fidelity, Hornby portrays a hero that has a lot of a compulsive reader, but he devotes his time to listening instead of reading. He finds, much as we find, an intrinsic lack of satisfaction in his life, mainly due to its expectations set by the stories told by pop-music songs. Shall he ever be able to get over them, to outgrow them? Or, in the best of the cases, to satisfy them? It is a difficult task given that he bases his acts on a constant search for the perfect relationship worth of a good song. But the outcome is for the reader to find. Meanwhile, we ought to reflect on our (shared) personal drama on living on a world that has not been written by Shakespeare, Cervantes or Hornby at least, but by thousands of millions of lousy storytellers collectively known as humanity.



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