The Autograph Man

"He had always wondered: can women do this too? Can they switch from real people to fantasy people and feel soothed by them? Will they ever tell? They don't tell. Women don't tell the truth about themselves. About love, about the way they love. Or else the truth is genuinely pure, involving no second-guessing - in which case, who could stand to hear it?

.. It is called a happy ending. The miracle of cinema is how rarely the convention of the happy ending is broken. The bigger miracle is that the convention of the ending is never broken at all. Alex watches Joey watching Kitty watching the huge flickering faces of people she presumes to be gods."

- The Autograph Man (Pg 161-162), Zadie Smith, Penguin Books

These two paragraphs just struck me while I was reading on the train on my way home. How does she do it? Putting the things we already know in prose in such a fresh way. I could never write like that. There's a detached quality to all good writers which I can never achieve.

If you didn't know already, I'm a Zadie fan. I've read On Beauty, White Teeth and now The Autograph Man. I guess it's the way she seems convoluted at the start, and then begin to make sense after you've read it through. And the characters are never perfect, always flawed. On drugs, having affairs or putting too much emphasis on friends, neglecting the family.

I hope I didn't breach any copyright law.. I did put my references, so it should be alright right? It's true that women never tell. Actually, it's even true for every relationship you can have. Truth is often hidden by perspective. How rare is surety!

I particularly loved the way she described the cinema and how the lover observes the one he loves watching the moving pictures, almost as if you could feel how Joey indulged in watching Kitty..