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the collector collector...
BY DWIGHT GARNER it's been a good year, thus far, for readers who like slim, absurdist, tragicomic fiction. First came Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers," a manic but ultimately touching book about, literally, a gathering of 100 brothers. Now here is "The Collector Collector," a new novel from young British writer Tibor Fischer, in which the narrator happens to be a piece of pottery. Or, as it prefers, "a bowl with a soul." One pleasant surprise about "The Collector Collector" is that this bowl really does have some soul. In the first third of the book, the bowl riffs on its long history and its various owners like a genuine hepcat -- or at least some jive-talking combination of Truman Capote and Nicholson Baker. When a rich but ignorant collector debates buying the bowl at auction, for instance, it silently (and hilariously) appraises him: "he is, in addition to being a lugal, a clown, a multi-story parking lot filled with jalopies of laughability, soooooo preposterous, a baboon of prodigious risibility." On a roll, the bowl can't help but continue: "The great pity about the absurdly rich is that they become absurd because none of them have the foresight to buy a wanker alarm, someone who would accompany them and just toll at apposite moments: 'You are being soooooo wanky.' That is the danger of wild wealth, it frees you from gravity." Clearly this is no ordinary urn. We quickly learn that, in addition to being sentient, the bowl has been around since nearly the beginning of time, has witnessed most of history's major cataclysms and has an almost photographic memory. What's more, this bowl has the ability to change shape, to impart wisdom to its owners and to suck out memories from those who touch it. The first sections of Fischer's book have a shrewd, funky exuberance that's impossible to deny -- you feel like he's writing the way an exquisite bowl would actually write if it could, with just the right amount of puzzled stiffness ("Rosa debeds and days herself") and a flair for strewing neologisms ("cashtropically") as it skims along. By this book's midpoint, however, you also begin to discover that Fischer hasn't really thought his tale through. "The Collector Collector" -- the title refers to the bowl itself -- has a narrator but no real narrative, and soon the plot begins to career around wildly. The book is essentially about what happens when the bowl falls into the hands of Rosa, a lonely young art appraiser who lives in London. Rosa is attractive and good-hearted ("I declare all my income. When my married friends have an emergency, I baby-sit willingly. I give blood."), but she is wildly unlucky in love and, the bowl soon surmises, a virgin. Rosa's too-peaceful existence is shattered by an uninvited house guest named Nikki, a nymphomaniac who's given to stealing everything in sight. Before long, Nikki is sleeping with dozens of men, burgling Rosa's house regularly and generally wreaking havoc. Rosa herself wigs out a little, and imprisons an advice columnist inside a deep well when the columnist can't help her find a man. Soon hired killers are involved, as well as a fat, brutish female angel -- the ghost of a woman Nikki once murdered. Needless to say, all of this feels frantic and somewhat desperate, as do the long stories the bowl spins about its own past -- and those it drags out of Rosa.
Tibor Fischer is a remarkable stylist; nearly every sentence here is spit-shined until it sparkles. The problem is that you never really care much about these characters, or about what happens to them. In the end, even that talking bowl begins to seem like a bit of a crock.
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BY Tibor Fischer