Popular Culture Review 30.2
/ Oh I love you / You know that I need you / Oh I love you .” Harrison yearns for divine presence in this 12 / 8 dirge that ends on the sound of what may be a heavenly door , or a coffin , creaking open and then slamming shut . Gogol ’ s yearning , though less spiritual , will be equally futile .
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This devastation is well on the way to fulfillment when hundreds of pages later 31-year-old Nikhil Ganguli ( Gogol officially changes his name to Nikhil before matriculating at Yale ) inserts into his compact disc player the Beatles ’ last-recorded album , Abbey Road , on a freezing morning in his Manhattan apartment . More bitter than the irony of the 14-year-old Gogol ’ s indifference to his father ’ s gifts of Indian music and the tales of Nikolai Gogol is that the love songs ( e . g ., “ Something ,” “ I Want You [ She ’ s So Heavy ]”) of this recording are , for Gogol , the aural backdrop of his year-long marriage to Moushumi , which on that cold morning is already null and void . At the moment , Moushumi , a graduate student at New York University , is attending a conference in Palm Beach , Florida , with her boyfriend . She has been cheating on Nikhil for months when he “ puts on his Abbey Road CD , skipping ahead to the songs that would have been on side 2 of the album ” ( 269 ). ( The first compact disc version of Abbey Road was released in 1987 ; its second iteration , remastered , was released in 2009 .)
Why should the narrator / Lahiri mention this detail�not that this is the record Nikhil wants to hear but that he starts it on the seventh track ? The short answer : to invite readers to coordinate their own playback of the album in real intertextual time with the novel . The longer answer begins with the observation that an LP ’ s sides are incompatible with compact discs . When a vinyl record is configured for compact
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