The Autograph Man is a deeply funny, existential tour around the hollow things of modernity - celebrity, cinema and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience.
Through London and then New York, Alex is sent on a paper-trail, searching for the only autograph that ever mattered to him, resisting the mystical lure of Kabbalah and Zen, and avoiding all collectors, conmen and interfering rabbis who would put themselves in his path. Pushing against the tide of his generation, Alex-Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as sonne part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated or sold...
L'auteur en quelques mots...
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975 and continues to live in the area.
The Autograph Man is her second novel. Her first book, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award.