Relationship Breakup Rankings

Author: Hornby (British)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-10-01
Features: A love letter from a man on the cusp of middle age, a crashed love black box buried deep in the sea, a psychological portrait of a man's transformation from immaturity to maturity! Reading The Honeymooners is like listening to a great single record. From the very beginning, you know it's truly wonderful. When the song ends, you'll want to listen to it again because it makes you feel young and growing. At the same time, a foolish smile will appear on your face. If this book were a record, we would immediately call it a classic, because that's exactly what it is. —Susan Moore, Guardian Columnist, UK
In many ways, this is a novel written only for adult men. Those who spend their lives avoiding adulthood want just such a book. —Howard Huo, Famous Music Critic
In a narrow alley in North London, 36-year-old Lo Fleming owns a small second-hand record shop. After three years of cohabitation, his girlfriend Lola leaves him and moves out of his home filled with records, tapes, and CD collections. Lo begins to list the "Breakup Rankings" of the most heartbreakingly painful women he has ever dated, in chronological order. Through witty and ironic self-mockery, he writes his life story as if arranging albums, song titles, and track lists, and Lo's life flows within them.
This is a true book for men, about relationships between men and women after thirty, about society's expectations of men and men's disorientation, about how men recover from rejection, about men's constant nightmare—"He must love you too, and he's better than me" (implying "He's bigger, and he's better than me"), about men's insecurities, fears, and sorrows, about men's narrow-mindedness (such as being obsessed with rankings or collections), about men's cynicism and paranoia. After old friends scatter or get married and have children, the abandoned middle-aged man is left with only these things. At least today, on battlefields or airports unrelated to breakups, you'll find that reading The Honeymooners is like listening to a single. The moment you start, you know it's a good song, but it ends quickly, so you want to listen again because it gives you a strange sense of growth (yes, a book with a protagonist who refuses to grow makes you feel like you're growing), and it leaves one after another of your already foolish smiles on your face.