Hornby: The nights without jazz in ‘Someone like you’

Five decades have passed since that movie ‘Guess who’s coming tonight’ by Katherine Herpburn and the recently deceased Sidney Poitier, where a young white woman wants to introduce her black boyfriend to her parents, who are confused by this situation. And, perhaps because this has not been completely overcome, the novel ‘Someone Like You’ by Nick Hornby arrived in recent months, where this is one of its plots. However, the main context is not that of the America of the vindication of civil rights and the assassination of Martin Luther King, but that of the referendum where the British had to decide their exit from the European Union. In Hornby’s novel, the arguments of those who want to remain in the EU and those who want to leave are opposed, and the author focuses more on the plot in favor of permanence, evidencing confusing ideas of a xenophobic nature on the part of those who argue for leaving. But this, in reality, is the background, because the real plot line, the novel’s greatest and most challenging conflict, is the difference in age, an educated 42-year-old woman and a 22-year-old hustler, both immersed in this political dichotomy. that divided the UK.

Sometimes there are tedious novels that seem to take a century to read a page, and others in which they are read in one stroke, it is what they call narrative rhythm and that characterizes Hornby’s style, with an omniscient narrator who does not get lost in digressions, but in generating a framework where lively and sparkling dialogues unfold. The author’s ability to observe critical issues in society has been like that of a vacuum cleaner, to later transform them into well-crossed plots in the plot of the novel, that is, issues even about whether what motivates parents to choose a school public or private is the quality of education or class prejudice, as shown by a character in this story, who adopted an Asian girl, but who prefers to take her to a private school so that she is not with other children like her, says the character cynically .

Nick Hornby studied English literature at Cambridge, beginning as a contributor to the press through music criticism. He is a recognized author in the Anglo-Saxon world, mainly in his country, Great Britain, and in the United States. In Spain he has published his novels in Anagrama in two languages ​​of our country, Spanish and Catalan.

The author, on the other hand, not only has experience as a narrator, but also as a screenwriter, this literary genre linked to the cinema where, as in the theater, the narrator is dispensed with, and which probably contributed to giving him greater skill in dialogues as a novelist. This story of Hornby works for some well-constructed and characterized characters, which causes the author to only have to let them unfold in this context that will lead them to face several conflicts, that is, differences, social prejudices, and the referendum for the exit from the EU.

The opposite of phlegm

Hornby is a British writer who seems to flee from a pompous vision for a more modern concept of society and language, that is, this novel by Hornby is the anti pomp, the opposite of phlegm and solemnity and that seeks to break the conventional .

Lucy is a literature teacher at a public school, has two children, and has separated from her alcoholic husband. She lives in a wealthy neighborhood in London. Joseph is a 22-year-old black guy, moonlighting, with occupations as disparate as a butcher, a kid’s soccer coach, a babysitter, and an aspiring DJ at a nightclub. They both meet when she needs a babysitter, he denotes a maturity superior to his age, he connects well with Lucy’s children, while she shows herself to be a different woman from the ones Joseph had known. There is a moment when she opens up to him, when she had called him as a babysitter to go to a jazz concert that she never went to, and it is on that night without jazz that she breaks the barrier between them. The story will begin to unfold with the conflicts caused by the differences between the two.

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