iPod Novel: “The Song is You”

In Arthur Phillips’ latest novel, the iPod “plays a role as pivotal as Puck’s in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In “The Song is You,” Julian Donahue,  a director of TV commercials in his mid-40s, former philanderer separated from his wife and man adrift in a state he thinks of as “divorcistan, a coolly celibate land.” Music is the center of his sole surviving desire. This appetite is, yes, partly nostalgic because Julian has been curating a “soundtrack to his days” since the debut of the Walkman when he was 15.

A quick check of the Amazon “search inside the book feature” revealed some 41 name drops for the iPod, which wouldn’t particularly inspire me to read it but I loved Phillips’ “Prague,” about a bunch of self-absorbed 20-something expats set in Budapest haunted by the feeling they should really be somewhere more happening, namely, Prague.  iPods in this novel sound like more just product placement…

Via Salon

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Image used with a CC license, thanks to myuibe

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