Well, funny and compulsive are possible adjectives to just throw in to describe the novel of Hornby. Rob, the narrator lives in a tiny flat in Crouch End, London. He's thirty-five years old, and owns a failing business (a record shop - he puts music into the centre of his life, but he's got potential as a human being, following Laura, his ex-ex and actual girlfriend), and his friends doesn't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers he hasn't lost. He keeps a list of his top-five memorable split ups. Not bad, hu? Rob, made sure, never to be in anything, work or relationship, too deep. To figure it out, his genius, if we can call it like that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame. You'd say that there are millions of him, but there aren't, really: lots 'a blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots 'a blokes read but are really fat, lots 'a blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots 'a blokes have got a Woody Allen sense of humour but look like Woody Allen,... Rob doesn't do any of these things at all, really; if he does OK with women it's not because of the virtues he has, but because of the shadows he doesn't have.
Rob says, women do what we do: "They save their best pairs for the nights when they know they're going to sleep with somebody. When you live with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty M&S scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house, your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you're surrounded by exotic lingerie for ever and ever amen... those dreams crumble to dust."
Nice part of the book, when Laura says to Rob:
" I just feel like sex, you know. I want to feel something else apart from misery and guilt. It's either that or I go home and put my hand in the fire unless you want to stub out some cigarettes out on my arm."
But Laura isn't like this. She's a lawyer.
Rob answers: "I've only got a couple left. I'm saving them for later. It'll be the sex, then."
"We'll have to do it in the car. I'll drive us somewhere."
She drives us somewhere...
Go for it, it is touching, moving and true to life.
Unser Tipp: Bitte "Jacken" zweckgebunden benützen. Oder geht man mit den Skiern in die Stadt?
