Customer Reviews

The Collector Collector: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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".

"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.

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.

When I started this book, I expected it to be along the lines of Under the Frog. It is, yet only slightly. The protagonist, Rosa, is your typical woman. She is simply an art collector and appraiser who comes into a piece of 5,000 year old earthenware. Her simplicity and "goody two shoes" attitude are sharply contrasted with the presence of the nymphomaniac klepto Nikki. This contrast provides the basis for the book as the bowl (who is also the narrator) is given ample opportunity to hearken back to the stories of the bowl's past 5,000 years of life. The stories related are funny as is the interplay between Nikki,Rosa [...].

All in all, a GREAT read. YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!

Hmmmm, what to read next? The Thought Gang.

Happy reading [....]

"I've had a planetful," begins the narrator of this comical novel, which is no understatement for an ancient ceramic bowl which knows some 5000 languages and which has seen the whole of human history happen past. This is a "bowl with soul" that knows it all, from the ubiquity of frozen iguanas to the secret symbolism of earrings, from the two-hundred and eighty-four types of buttocks to the ninety-two types of surprise to the ten unceasing conversations.

Leave it to the off-kilter imagination of Tibor Fischer to make a piece of curmudgeonly pottery the hero of his 3rd book. And, if you think about it, you can forget about the proverbial fly-on-the-wall: sentient crockery *would* make the ultimate unseen observer. Rarely do people look around & wonder if the earthenware is listening in.

But Mr. Fischer isn't content to let the idea of an (ostensibly) inanimate narrator sink in before he starts throwing the reader curve-after-screwball in! ! his inimitably rarefied-but-no-less-pungent style. Enter Rosa, a lovelorn art-appraiser with the ability to "divine" the history of objects. Enter Nikki, a nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac who aspires to circus stardom. Enter Lump, less an ex-lover of Nikki's than a protective Golem, more undead than living. Enter a kidnapping, some thefts, and not a few couplings.

Now read on as these and a host of other colorful denizens & complications (both past & present) move through what is essentially a pot's-eye view of humanity's endless struggles with the most basic of dilemmas, illustrated with hilarious asides & boiled down to one final question: Who finds true love?

Give The Collector Collector a gander. In it, you'll find true entertainment.

This isn't Nabokov, but Fischer sure knows how to tell an amusing story. The 1st person perspective in this one is fresh and fun. The plot serves more to give the Collector Collector a reason to reminisce than to hold the story together, but the Collector Collector holds it together just fine. The characters are almost cartoonish, but not overly silly.

This is a great book if you're looking for a light, amusing read. I enjoyed it a lot.

The beginning of this story wasn't as interesting as I had expected, but as you read on and get engrossed in the story, it becomes a truly enjoyable experience. The stories are very quirky, and the pace increases towards the end. This is one of the better books on contemperary fiction around.

"The Collector Collector" is a veritable, dark comic medley about life, love, success, failure, etc... Fischer, like Tom Robbins{Still Life With Woodpecker, et al}, (and a semi obscure writer named J. Joyce) before him, uses unbridled imagination and hybridization as 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 knowing urn. For all it's whimsical satire, this novel presents deep sobering thoughts into contemporary society.

I won't synopsize, as you can find that anywhere. Tibor has written three excellent novels: Under The Frog, The Thought Gang, and The Collector Colletor. Even if you have been disappointed by his other works, do not write him off until you have tried one or more of these three. I recommend them in that order. All bitterly funny, all astonishingly original, all deeply memorable, all vastly superior to his more recent efforts.

This is one of the best books ever! From the very beginning it's an amazingly entertaining piece of storytelling. It has a decidedly british tone to it.. which takes a few pages to sink into. But once that hurdle is vaulted, you're in for a nearly constant chuckle-fest for probably 90% of the rest of the book.

The protagonist's attitude, the situations, the descriptions! Ughh.. I simply loved traversing through the language play of every page. It's so quotable. So fresh. So much fun.. I bet it would be a great book to read aloud - in spite of the many breaks for extended laughter that will have to be taken.

The only reason it doesn't get a full 5 stars is because toward the end.. well, it starts to fizzle and drag. His delivery seems more rushed and dry, becoming needlessly repetitive. It's like he doesn't quite know what to do with his characters after a while.. or what the dialog should be devoted to. He does wrap the plot up in some way or another - just not with the panache available to the rest of the book.

I SO COMPLETELY recommend this book to everyone. Oh, and have a dictionary handy. The vocabulary used is quite a bit beyond most things I've read lately.