The Collector Collector: A Novel

by Tibor Fischer

Book Overview

To a small flat in South London comes a Sumerian bowl: but the bowl is the Collector Collector, clay with something to say, an object d'art who will offer Rosa, its owner, vast swathes of unrecorded... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080505118X
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Length: 221 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Great Fun to Read

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.

Probably pointless in the grand scheme of things, but FUNNY!

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 [....]

Thoroughly Rabelaisian

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.

Another Fischer Fling

Forget about all the bowl jokes and the fact that the narrator is one. This book is not about crockery. It's about humans. Mr. Fischer has the amazing ability to pick up odd human traits and use them the exploit this mad mad mad world we find ourselves in. By using a narrator that's thousands of years old Fischer can really show us how silly our lives--and the things we fill them with--are.The book was laugh out loud funny and a page turner (quite cliche, I know, but's it's monday morning). I brought it to parties with me and sat in the corner to read it while everyone else was dancing. Actually, I'm glad I finished it--now I can have my life back. Be warned, it's a dangerous book.

A Hilarious Pot's-Eye View of Human History

"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.