A Lack of Color

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

Phenomenal book. Very English.  That dry humor that always pops up at inappropriate times – to me this is the charm of British humor.  It’s real.

From the jacket:

The Autograph Man is a whirlwind tour of celebrity and our fame-obsessed times.  Following one Alex-Li Tandem – a twenty-something, Chinese-Jewish autograph dealer turned on by sex, drugs and organized religion – it takes in London and New York, love and death, fathers and sons, as Alex tries to discover how a piece of paper can bring him closer to his heart’s desire.  Exposing our misconceptions about our idols – about ourselves – The Autograph Man is a brilliant, unforgettable tale about who we are and what we really want to be.

My favourite quotes so far.

“It was just one hairless animal stabbing another repeatedly through an open wound.”

“What now is just what is.”

Alex is working on this book that compares Jewish things to Goyish things, he basically puts everything he can think of into these two categories. For example, suicide.  Suicide involving “stones in the pocket, head in the oven” is Goyish.  Then there’s the type of suicide that “embraces you”, that you don’t struggle with. “No complicated knots or car exhausts.” That’s Jewish.  I love it, it’s absolutely brilliant. I want to start categorizing everything into Goyish or Jewish.

One of Alex’s best friends is a Rabbi named Rubenfine. There are repeated events througout the book that invlove Rubenfine and two other rabbis.  The three always seem to be lurking around the neighborhood trying to move furniture and fit impossibly large items into tiny European cars.  They always want to pass on words of wisom, stories from Zohar and the Talmud or just to meddle in Alex’s life.  Truly English, truly random.