The Collector Collector: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Great Fun to Read
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: A Hilarious Pot's-Eye View of Human History
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Satirical Imagination
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Satirical Imagination
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Satirical Imagination
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: This author is a new literary genius of our time
Review: For those of you looking for a strong central plot, beware. This book does not fall victim to the typical novel outline used by the majority of today's authors. This book is written by a man who has dared to use his intelligence and wit to create a novel that is viciously satirical in its plays on words and odd story lines while simultaneously keeping the reader entranced with its modern edge and style that can only be compared with a bizaare hybrid of Shakespeare and Chuck Palahniuk (writer of "Fight Club"). For all of you who require a bit of a challenge with your recreational reading, this book is both strange and delicious in its approach.

Rating:
Summary: Life in a Fischer Bowl
Review: 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".

Rating:
Summary: Life in a Fischer Bowl
Review: 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".

Rating:
Summary: Back on top form
Review: Taking a step back from the over-cleverness that ruined much of the Thought Gang, Tibor Fischer is back on form with the Collector Collector, a book narrated by a dish/bowl/vase, whatever it feels like being at any given moment.

Fischer has a wonderful sense of the absurd - as you'd hope from a man writing a novel from the point of view of a piece of stoneware - and the anecdotes are superb.

The plot involves several stealings, some gangsters, some authenticators, a shipwreck or two, and a lot of discussion of peoples' noses.

Pun follows pun. This dish has a superb vocabulary. But doesn't allow its cleverness to swamp the jokes (which was my problem, ultimately, with the Thought Gang.)

It isn't very profound, and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. But it is very very funny and a real page-turner.

Enjoy.

ORGANICPRANKSTER

Rating:
Summary: A pleasant, if somewhat disjointed, diversion.
Review: The Collector Collector is tols from the perspective of a 5000 year old bowl that has seen it all. "People do things in front of me that they'd never dream of doing in front of their pets" informs the rather droll, articulate, somewhat cynical bowl. After revealing a few examples, we are ready to forgive the cynicism.

The title is a word play. The stories are all about the various owner/collectors of the object in question, which the bowl considers to be a string of collections of its own.

The story opens with the bowl currently in the hands of Rosa, a romantically desperate young Londoner who works for an auction agency that has acquired the piece and is estimating and appraising it, a job that falls to Rose. Rosa is a perfect fit for the task as she possesses some latent extrasensory capabilities that allow her to sense the bowls stories and experiences, which both stimulate and distract her. The primary distraction is from Nikki, her temporary roommate who is a psycho maniac slowly stealing Rosa blind behind her back.

This book is not quite up to Fischer's usual standards, and that is, I believe, a matter of a fault in construction. Fischer never seems to be sure if this is a novel or a book of short stories with a theme. As a result, the narrative exists somewhere in between and this leads to some awkwardness and disjointedness throughout the text.

That criticism notwithstanding, the book nevertheless provides considerable pleasure simple by allowing us to share once again in Fischer's somewhat skewed and cosmically comic world view. The man may not always be polished but he is always funny.

On the whole, a pleasant diversion but not even close to Fischer at his best.