This author is a new literary genius of our time

books:

	• The Collector Collector: A Novel Tibor Fischer Metropolitan Books, 1997 - 221 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

I LOVE this book.. but it does fizzle at the end

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.

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Chick-lit a la Marquez

A boastful narrative by a sentient, if autistic, millennia-old piece of pottery with a taste for wordplay, improbable sexual escapades and shape-changing. No, you read all of that right.

The style smacks of Gabriel Garcia Marquez comparing writing chops with Salman Rushdie while trying out for a Bridget Jones Philosophy of Unmarried Life competition.

On the face of it, a bowl that's been around for most of human history encounters Rosa, a human with a facility for imbibing its visions via an osmosis-like effect while in tactile contact with it. The bowl can also absorb Rosa's emotions and memories while selectively feeding her reminiscences about its eventful past. Rosa is seeking love in London but is singularly unsucessful; she has kidnapped an agony aunt columnist and is keeping her imprisoned in a well in the hope of consultation on how to find Mr. Right. Nikki, an adventuress with a taste for sexual escapades, robbery and general immorality foists herself on Rosa as a flatmate. Rosa has a best friend called Lettuce whose chief purpose in life appears to be to indiscriminately eat whatever is in Rosa's kitchen and be impervious to Rosa's insults. Nikki has a guardian angel called Lump, who seems to be a bit of female walking dead, the approximate size and disposition of a Sherman tank. And there is a jar of beetroot pickle that nobody can open.

I'm sorry if this all sounds a bit disjointed and bizarre. That's probably because it is.

Now, Mr Douglas Adams was every bit as inventive and wacky (more so, arguably) in his misnumbered trilogy in five parts (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) but he was never irritating. And he did have a point at the end of all those bizarre quantum goings-on. (Namely, 42.)

Unfortunately, with Mr Fischer, the cleverness with words and the relentless enumeration of past encounters begins to jar (pun unintended) by about the fifth page and you wish the bowl would put a lid on it. There are bizarre reminiscences that serve no purpose other than to highlight Mr Fischer's facility with words. And at the end of all the bizarre ceramic goings-on, there is no point. Probably because a bowl has no point to begin with.

3 stars for some ingenious word usage (particularly, "florida" as a euphemism for human congress.) I'm in a generous mood because of the music I'm listening to.

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It's Only Rock & Roll, But I Like It

This book is funny and smart. As others have noted, it isn't War & Peace, or Ulysses, either. More like a very adult, edgy comic book. However, this male-written female perspective on males and other females really rings true (or else the women I work with and to whom I am often invisible have been putting me on all these years). This turned out to be the most fascinating aspect of the book, and I think it is no small achievement.

This author is a new literary genius of our time

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

An ancient Sumerian bowl becomes the narrator of a comic novel about a young London art appraiser, Rosa, whose appartment is gradually taken over by an uninvited houseguest, a sex-addicted kleptomaniac named Nikki. Tour.

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