or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
266 used & new from £0.01

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
The Autograph Man
 
 

The Autograph Man (Paperback)

by Zadie Smith (Author)
2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
Price: £6.98 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £1.01 (13%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Tuesday, November 17? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details
34 new from £1.50 231 used from £0.01 1 collectible from £0.01

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Autograph Man + White Teeth
Price For Both: £11.45

Show availability and delivery details

  • This item: The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

    In stock.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

  • White Teeth by Zadie Smith

    In stock.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

White Teeth

White Teeth

by Zadie Smith
3.3 out of 5 stars (204)  £4.47
On Beauty

On Beauty

by Zadie Smith
3.1 out of 5 stars (84)  £4.49
Mona in the Promised Land

Mona in the Promised Land

by Gish Jen
4.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £6.99
Time of Our Singing

Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers
4.6 out of 5 stars (17)  £5.99
The Nature of Blood

The Nature of Blood

by Caryl Phillips
4.8 out of 5 stars (5)  £5.13
Explore similar items

Product details

  • Paperback: 432 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (22 May 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140276343
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140276343
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 115,070 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #10 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > S > Smith, Zadie

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

In her second novel, The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith has set herself the unenviable task of following up a certain segment of recent literary history. Her first novel, the bestselling, award-laden and much-hyped White Teeth wore its ambitions lightly: an exuberant comic foray into the lives of three disparate families living in suburban north London, it dealt simultaneously--and deftly--with wider multicultural and political motifs.

The Autograph Man has a similar ebullience and an equally dazzling panoply of characters. Its hero Alex Li-Tandem is "one of this generation who watch themselves", a Chinese-Jewish north Londoner who is first introduced as a child accompanying his father to a wrestling match between those two larger-than-life scions of 1970s Saturday afternoon television--Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. When Alex's father dies in the pandemonium surrounding the pursuit of Big Daddy's autograph, the twin themes of the novel are launched--one is the bereaved Alex's search for a replacement to fill the gulf, the other his obsession with tracking down, buying and selling autographs. Alex seeks one autograph in particular and seemingly in vain--that of Kitty Alexander, a fading film star. The route he follows in his search has much to say about the nature of celebrity and the privacy of souls, of fantasy and reality--all narrated in Smith's breathless prose.

The Autograph Man plays on many strands and clever observations--in particular Jewishness, goyishness and Zen Buddhism. Smith is a superbly assured writer whose images stick in the mind; for example, Alex's girlfriend Esther has "hair plaited like a puzzle". The dialogue is vivid and there is much humour but at times the convoluted plot threatens to spill over into anarchy and the humour can be self-conscious. Though this does not diminish the entertainment value of The Autograph Man, it does--frustratingly--make it appear insincere. --Catherine Taylor --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



Product Description

"The novel is a pleasure from the first page to the last" David Sexton, EVENING STANDARD Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, it is his business to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them,occasionally fake them, and all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. 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. Pushing against the tide of his generation, Alex-Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated or sold.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

The Autograph Man
74% buy the item featured on this page:
The Autograph Man 2.7 out of 5 stars (43)
£6.98
White Teeth
13% buy
White Teeth 3.3 out of 5 stars (204)
£4.47
On Beauty
7% buy
On Beauty 3.1 out of 5 stars (84)
£4.49
The Bell Jar
3% buy
The Bell Jar 4.5 out of 5 stars (101)
£3.58

 

Customer Reviews

43 Reviews
5 star:
 (2)
4 star:
 (9)
3 star:
 (15)
2 star:
 (7)
1 star:
 (10)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.7 out of 5 stars (43 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars An Unfortunate Work, 25 Jan 2005
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Many reviewers have written about Zadie Smith's second novel in relation to White Teeth, and seem to come at it with a lot of baggage as a result. Let me just state for the record that I don't have a horse running in the Zadie Smith stakes. I've never read or heard an interview with her, and don't really know anything about her. I read "White Teeth" and mostly enjoyed it, but didn't think it was as brilliant as many others did. I approached this book as a blank slate, without knowing anything about it.

It's not good. In fact, it's pretty bad. If you wanted a textbook example of the literary sophomore slump, here it is. The story concerns Alex-Li Tandem, a half-Chinese, half-Jewish (Tandem... get it?) dealer in autographs. The main plotline concerns his obsession with the fictitious old film star Kitty Alexander and with obtaining one of her ultra-rare autographs. The central theme, however, concerns Alex's inability to ever deal with the sudden death of his father. This death occurs in the excellent prologue, which forms the first tenth of the book and is really the only part worth reading. Covering Alex's childhood visit to a wrestling match at Albert Hall, complete with interesting digression into the venue's history, this section would have made an excellent standalone short story.

Alas, it is followed by 300+ pages of muddled prose populated by characters that are dreadfully flat and uninteresting. Alex is whiny loser, who is unable to connect with the people around him, seeking solace in the bottle, or in his obsession for autographs. He's not particularly likeable (not that this is a prerequisite of good fiction), but no matter how awfully he acts toward them, his friends and acquaintances (everyone he meets in the book, really), are incredibly (in the strictest sense of the word) tolerant and forgiving of him. The reader is given no glimpse whatsoever of what might make Alex worth having as a friend, much less the long-term boyfriend of one gorgeous woman and the occasional lover of another gorgeous woman. None of the supporting cast is written with any distinction, although there are momentary flashes of interest to be had from the legendary prostitute Honey Richardson, fellow autograph men Lovelear and Dove, and most of all, the thug turned milkman.

The story mostly follows Alex's attempt to locate Kitty Alexander, while a parallel story concerns the plans for some kind of Jewish mourning rite for his father. The first offers Smith the chance to try to make some points about celebrity. But this is never explored with any depth or from a new angle, and there are already scores of books which have done this much much better. The second plotline allows Smith to try and say something about religion, or more specifically Judaism. Again, she never commits to this thematic line with any seriousness, and the result is a mish-mash of Kabbalah, confusion over cultural identity, and semi-comic rabbis. Novels about Judaism are a dime a dozen, as are novels about the search for faith, and Smith has added nothing of interest to either realm. The result is a book that's shockingly dull, and written in an embarrassing self-consciously clever style which is rarely (if ever) as witty as Smith so painfully obviously intends it to be. This is an unfortunate work that reads as if Smith was locked in a windowless room, handed the merest shred of a premise, and then told she couldn't leave until she'd written 400 pages. As Alex-Li would say, "Ugh."

Comment Comments (3) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual for the sake of being intellectual, 13 Aug 2003
By Lisa Jones (CHATHAM, KENT United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
On first glance The Autograph Man promised a good read. Indeed, I have never shied away from the prospect of an intellectual and challenging read, as promised by the cover.

What a disappointment then, to enter the heart of the book and come out the other side unfulfilled, disappointed and confused. Smith certainly reckons herself as a "wizard of prose" - as promised by the book's cover, but this really is an example of intellectual words being used for the sake of it. Intellectual words and phrases are an absolute joy when they form part of an enchanting and beguiling story. In the case of The Autograph Man Smith expects us not to see beyond the clever words, and therefore not to notice that the characters are unlikeable and the conversations between the unlikeable characters are unintelligible.

I am now making the "International Gesture for Boredom" - which started with the first page of the book, and ended when I threw it in the bin, three quarters of the way through.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars One out of Zen, 3 Oct 2002
By John Self "www.theasylum.wordpress.com" (Belfast, NI) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: The Autograph Man (Hardcover)
The Autograph Man is the most disappointing second novel since Harper Lee owned up to ghosting that Britney Spears book. I loved White Teeth - and yahboo to those who just praised its precocity; it was a great read whatever the author's age - and expected to be entirely bowled over by The Autograph Man. And perhaps that was the trouble - my expectations were so high that I'd be bound to feel let down if I didn't actually die of pleasure.

But on any reading it's just not that good. Where White Teeth was warm, Autograph Man is trying-to-be-cool but just ending up cold; where there was colour, now there is monochrome; where that was amiable, this is standoffish. The main characters are colourless and mostly ciphers for Smith's points-to-be-made on Judaism and celebrity. And most of the jokes had my toes curling all the way up to my spine ("Alex had read about dignified silences in novels. This was his first attempt." Stop trying so hard!!). It rises to Smith's unquestionable potential only in two places: the prologue, with its excellent digressive and funny narrative on Victoria and Albert and 1980s wrestling; and the third quarter of the book, set in America, where we meet the only interesting characters in Kitty Alexander and Honey Richardson.

Overall The Autograph Man - astonishingly and crushingly - seems like a step backwards from White Teeth, and not a flowering. Still, she's only 27 and has got her c**p book in early. Fingers crossed that it's all up, up and away from here.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Went on too long - ended too soon.
An everyday tale, really, keeps you reading but nothing terribly original or special. The language is what lifts this story out of the mundane. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Gillyp

3.0 out of 5 stars A pretentious and disappointing follow-up to White Teeth
After her impressive debut novel White Teeth and the hype surrounding it there was always a danger that Zadie Smith would join the ranks of literary Establishment luvvies and... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Trevor Coote

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
This book is a real disappointment. I loved On Beauty and thought that White Teeth was okay.

I kept reading to the end of the book thinking that it might get better... Read more
Published 14 months ago by J. Jones

1.0 out of 5 stars Self conscious and boring
A disappointing second novel. I enjoyed 'White Teeth' (although it was not perfect), and hoped that 'The Autograph Man' would be even better. It's not. Read more
Published 21 months ago by BookWorm

1.0 out of 5 stars Read it in "Tandem" with something else....
I'm reading this for my book group. I'm aware of the hype around the author. I haven't read anything else by her. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Beej68

3.0 out of 5 stars somewhat confusing
I love Zadie Smith and I think her writing is brilliant. With this book it's not always easy to tell that, which is a shame. Read more
Published on 18 Oct 2007 by Mrs. K. A. Wheatley

4.0 out of 5 stars why is this book so hated?
i dont understand how this book is so hated? i love it, i think its great. i've read it twice. it may not be no 'white teeth' but it still is an interesting read.
Published on 18 Jun 2006 by clare

5.0 out of 5 stars You are all wrong wrong wrong
This was the 2nd Zadie Smith book I read and I found it the best. It is utterly compelling and I simply can't get it out of my head. Read more
Published on 12 Jun 2006 by Jen

3.0 out of 5 stars Try it on tape...
I was quite suprised to read all the negative reviews of this book having found the characters realistic and oddly sympathetic. Read more
Published on 17 May 2006 by eve

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting
This is the first Zadie Smith I've ever read. Needless to say, it wasn't fantastic, but I did enjoy it quite a bit. Read more
Published on 2 April 2006

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject


Feedback

Ad

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.