Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Life in a Fischer Bowl, April 25, 2001
This review is from: The Collector Collector: A Novel (Paperback)
I enjoyed Fischer's book "The Thought Gang". A lot, actually. Unfortunately, for its first half, "The Collector Collector" did not live up to that book's standards. It lacked its narrative thrust and rollicking sense of humour. Hindsight tells me that I just wasn't getting Fischer's intent. I now see that he wrote a demented, perverted, and hyper-articulate version of "Bridget Jones' Diary", where the female protagonists are as likely to maim and murder their sexual conquests, as fall in love with them. Also, there's a professional matchmaker trapped down a well by a dissatisfied customer, and many frozen iguanas. This is all filtered through the magic-realist perspective of the main character, a 5,000-year-old bowl. Who can read minds. And change shapes. If none of this makes sense to you, I take full blame, for Fischer manages to hold it all together perfectly. On the surface, there's much here to giggle at, and think about. But underneath all that, there's also a lot of loneliness in the book. People are constantly running from or pushing away romantic partners, for inexplicable reasons. Rosa, in whose London flat much of the action takes place, is desperate for every man she meets to fall in love with her. Contrast this with Nikki, a kleptomaniac/prostitute/houseguest, who doesn't even know what kind of happiness she wants. And then we have our narrator, the bowl, who appears to have witnessed the entirety of human history, and has an endless catalogue of human characteristics stored away, but can't speak with those around him (her?). There's really not much story here to hang your hat on. The book is a series of quick scenes, tableaus, culled from Rosa and Nikki's everyday life interspersed with stories from the bowl's memory. I found that hard to handle at first, but got used to the style after a while. And in the end, even though I didn't enjoy it as much as "The Thought Gang", I still got a kick out of "The Collector Collector".
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Satirical Imagination, March 3, 2000
"The Collector Collector" is a veritable, dark comic medley about life, love, success, failure, etc... Fischer, like Tom Robbins (and a semi-obscure writer named J. Joyce) before him, uses unbridled structural imagination and hybridization as the central vehicles to express his protagonist's vaguely normal existence in a sea of eccentricity. This book deserves considerable attention, if nothing else, for the author's choice of narrator; the wise and discerning urn. For all it's whimsical satire, this novel presents deep sobering insight into contemporary society.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thoroughly Rabelaisian, February 12, 2000
After reading "Under the Frog," this is the sort of successor that I expected from Tibor Fischer. Where "The Thought Gang" stroked toward Sterne's end of the pool, losing itself (I believe) in an excess of excess, "The Collector Collector" is Rabelaisian through and through. Panurge has become a bowl with a real animus for Gorgon crockery, and his companion (however briefly) is Rosa, not on a journey to Lanternland, but on a quest for just one decent fellow to share her life with (an interesting twist on Rabelais' tale, where it is Panurge who seeks advice on marriage). There were times I laughed so hard (the Mad Poets collection) that I was incapacitated for many minutes afterward, and there were other times (Rosa alone in her hotel room in Australia, too depressed to do anything but breathe) that I was taken once again at how adept Mr. Fischer is at juxtaposing robust, often black humor with scenes of such unaffected poignancy. An exquisite book.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
