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Return to Book Page. Preview — The Collector by John Fowles. The Collector by John Fowles. Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. Get A Copy. Paperback , Vintage Classics , pages. Published October 21st by Vintage first published More Details Original Title.
Frederick Clegg , Miranda Grey. United Kingdom London, England. Other Editions All Editions Add a New Edition. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about The Collector , please sign up. How is this book featured in the “most disturbing book ever written” AND “best books of the 20th century”?
Also, is it PG stuff or would it be inappropriate for a high-school age person? Stefania Mihai Because having disturbing content and being a good book are not mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it one of the best books of the 20 …more Because having disturbing content and being a good book are not mutually exclusive. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it one of the best books of the 20th century, but it was very well-written.
The psychological abuse, the description of both the villain’s and the victim’s attitudes vs. I’m not sure what PG means. The psychological abuse depicted here is pretty strong and the ending is veeery creepy.
I think it would be too shocking for a 13 year-old kid. Hell, it shocked me a lot, and I’ve seen many seasons of Criminal Minds : year-olds, yes, maybe.
Then again, it always depends on the kid. See all 5 questions about The Collector…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Collector. Apr 06, Brenna rated it really liked it. Rather than go into the plot details I’d rather touch on the larger metaphors of the book in this review. Although the basic plot is chilling enough on its own A man kidnaps a beautiful and intelligent young girl the parts that truly disturbed me had to do more with what I believe Fowles was saying about modern culture and the rise of the middle class.
Though this book is decidedly “British” in many ways, I think the issues he raises are applicable to any society where a large middle class is Rather than go into the plot details I’d rather touch on the larger metaphors of the book in this review.
Though this book is decidedly “British” in many ways, I think the issues he raises are applicable to any society where a large middle class is created in a relatively short amount of time. For me, this book is asking whether financial stability really leads to morality and more fulfilling lives as in Major Barbara or if perhaps we actually lose our souls once our bellies are fed.
As some have mentioned in other reviews, Miranda is the stereotypical posh young artist. Born rich, it’s easy for her to dismiss the complaints of the lower classes while at the same time hurling scorn at the society that produced her.
I’ve met many people like Miranda especially during my Masters at Columbia School of the Arts where trust fund babies were the norm, I went to school with a Pulitzer heiress for goodness sake and usually found them boring and shallow, quick to namedrop an artist or recite tired rhetoric.
But as her story progressed I began to like her more and more; Miranda is extremely self-aware, and I sensed that given time, she would grow out of her naivety and become a truly amazing woman.
She is only 20 after all, barely an adult, and for all her idealistic pretension she is trying to evolve and grow something that’s can’t be said for many of my Columbia peers. That’s where the butterfly metaphor becomes even more apt; it’s not just that she’s a butterfly that Frederick has collected, it’s what a butterfly represents: metamorphoses. It’s almost as if Frederick has trapped her right when she was about to break out of her cocoon, halting her true beauty right before she was about to spread her wings.
Which brings me to Frederick as a stand-in for middle-class mediocrity. Reading this book, I was often reminded of the idea that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Frederick is indifferent to everything: art, war, sex, etc. The only thing he seems to respond to is a fleeting type of beauty, and all he wants to do with that beauty is possess it. Not love it, not understand it, just possess it. Similarly, the rise of the middle class in America and the UK should have been a renaissance of ideas once our bellies were fed.
In many ways it was the civil rights and feminist movements come to mind , but in others, like the rise of reality television, celebrity culture and punditry news, our success has just made us comfortable and indifferent to human suffering. We go on collecting pop music, techno gadgets, houses, cars, spouses, designer clothes, with no question or investigation as to why.
With the internet we have the opportunity to learn about anything and everything, for the first time in history the entire history of the world is available at our fingertips.
Why then does misinformation and stupidity seem to be on the rise rather then the reverse? Why then are we becoming less literate rather than more? I agree with Miranda when she says art collectors are the worst offenders.
The idea that art is merely an investment just like the idea that a house is merely an investment rather than a home you share your life in is abhorrent to me. I could never stand to look at an ugly painting in my home just because it was worth money, nor could I ever live with myself if I hoarded Picassos or Bacons or Kirchners purely for my own benefit.
Because the true lover of beauty and not all beauty is beautiful as Bacon proves wants to share that beauty with the world. They want everyone to see, hear, taste, feel, and enjoy that beauty so that others lives may be enriched as well.
They want everyone to feel as passionately as they do about what they love, but more importantly they just want others to feel. View all 31 comments. I read this when I was very young. Young enough that anything with a sexual connotation was interesting to me. Even really perverse deviations like this.
A collector of butterflies ‘collects’ a girl and holds her prisoner. His deviation is far deeper than merely sex. But of course, sex is implied all the time. There are two sorts of kept women, those gold-diggers who actively sought it, and those trophy wives who had never planned for it and had been actively courted.
This is a trophy wife by for I read this when I was very young. This is a trophy wife by force, not a sex slave but a ‘wife’.
It’s a very original story, writing at it’s finest. And it’s creepy, very very creepy. There are a lot of excellent reviews on GR about this book, but in my opinion they all give far too much away. The book is like an onion. The outside skin, then the world within, layer upon layer.
And at it’s resolution, quite unexpectedly there is a tiny green shoot. Every detail you know about the story or the characters will take away a layer for you.
View all 37 comments. Fredrick is a clerk and butterfly collector who wins some money that lets him retire. Fredrick is lonely and has trouble getting along with others, the only people he really has are his aunt and cousin.
He watches an art student named Miranda who starts to become his obsession. When he suddenly has a lot of free time and money on his hands, his daydreams about Miranda turn dark and he plans to kidnap her and hold her hostage in the cellar of an old cottage he buys until she gets to know him and Fredrick is a clerk and butterfly collector who wins some money that lets him retire.
When he suddenly has a lot of free time and money on his hands, his daydreams about Miranda turn dark and he plans to kidnap her and hold her hostage in the cellar of an old cottage he buys until she gets to know him and falls in love with him. I really enjoyed the book personally, I liked the writing style and even though its about something macabre Fowles doesn’t make it exploitative or gore-y to shock the reader. A lot of the focus is on the characters change and development as well as their thought process through out.
I think it’s really well done, both the Fredrick and Miranda parts are distinct and feel like two separate people. Everything unfolding the way it does felt so real too, the way Fredrick distances himself from what he’s doing and tries to justify it, insisting he doesn’t mean to do it until he does it even though everything is being meticulously planned.
Also Miranda’s conflicted feelings over Fredrick and her slow breakdown from living confined and alone. I originally read this book because I was listening to last podcast on the left which I recommend to anyone who likes cults or serial killers but isn’t sensitive to jokes that may be considered offensive and they mention Leonard Lake being obsessed with the book.
I checked and there are multiple murders associated with the book and so I just wanted to see what about this book was causing all these people to feel like yes killing is great. Anyways the only thing I can come up with is that since the book was published in the s there wasn’t as much about sadistic killers or people doing crimes like these out there so it appealed to them and Fowles does such a good job capturing a certain kind of personality in Fredrick that people really identified with it.
It also gave them a good model of how to escalate to the point of doing things like kidnapping and murdering because really in the book Fredrick just starts off by dreaming about it and it goes from there. That’s all I’ve got because view spoiler [ Fredrick never really hurts Miranda or forces her to do anything especially at first, he kind of just likes having her hide spoiler ] so I’m not sure why that would inspire Leonard Lake to want a slave that he can use for sex and to take care of the house?
The author in interviews said that the book is about social class and money and I do see that much more clearly in the book than any message about how its a good idea to kidnap women.
I’m not sure how much I agree with the social commentary though probably because it has been decades since the book has been written. I do understand the point that money and idle time given to people can lead to them doing things they might not have otherwise but I don’t think the class or money is the problem so much as the person themselves.
View all 16 comments. Nov 30, Paul Bryant rated it really liked it Shelves: novels. This is one of those boy meets girl, chloroforms her, throws her in the back of the van and stuffs her in his basement type stories. Fred is the sweetest psycho ever! The kindest and most attentive! No slurping and grunting at all! This is a brilliant stroke by John Fowles and really messes with your mind.
As does the whole book. After that things just go badly. View all 11 comments. Aug 09, Dana Ilie rated it it was amazing Shelves: classic-literature.
I definitely think Book Readers should have this book on their shelf. View all 17 comments. It’s been hard for me to focus lately — gee, I wonder why? Over the past month, I’ve begun several books, lost interest, shelved them. Instead, I find myself studying grim news items and statistics, scrolling through memes on social media, staring blankly out my window onto empty streets and watching old black and white movies or TV shows I’ve missed over the past decade.
All while trying to work from home while I still have a job. Then I came across this book. I knew vaguely what it was about, having long ago seen the acclaimed movie adaptation starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar.
About 50 pages in, I realized it was the perfect book to read in semi quarantine. Ferdinand, a. Frederick, Clegg is a nondescript something clerk in London who collects butterflies and has one other obsession: Miranda, a young, attractive art student he’s seen and stalked.
When he wins the pools the UK equivalent of the lottery , he decides to abduct Miranda and keep her in the house he’s bought in the country, complete with highly secure cellar, which he’s outfitted for the newest item in his collection.
That’s essentially the story. Miranda tries to escape, of course, and Ferdinand tries to stop her. She requests items from town, including some things that could perhaps hint that she’s that missing girl from the art college.
Above all, she tries to find out what Ferdinand wants from her. What’s so fascinating about John Fowles’s first novel is that it has the outline of a thriller but it’s really so much more. While the first part of the book is told from Ferdinand’s POV — Fowles is very good at getting inside the twisted mind of what we might call an “incel” today — the second switches to Miranda’s POV, and it’s here that the book gets really interesting.
Miranda keeps a secret diary, and through her accounts of her time in the cellar we see different takes on scenes we’ve already witnessed. Plus, she’s got obsessions of her own, including a much older semi-famous artist. While it’s easy to have sympathy for her in the first part — she’s clearly a victim — things get more complicated when we read her thoughts about class, education, physical beauty and art in the second.
What makes this such an effective quarantine novel is how isolated and trapped Miranda feels, removed from her friends, her family, her home. She longs to breathe fresh air, look up into the sky.
She misses even the simplest, most banal activities. Through her diary, you can also see how her entrapment has changed her feelings about life, art and freedom.
There are lots of literary references — to The Tempest , of course, with Miranda referring to Clegg as her Caliban — and Emma , but also to more contemporary books about other anti-social characters like The Catcher in the Rye and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
The discussions about art are thoughtful and engaging. This novel must have made a huge splash when it appeared in the s, decades before such fiction became a subgenre. Based on this, I’m definitely going to seek out — and perhaps, um, collect — some of his other novels.
View all 33 comments. Impotent sociopath kidnaps beautiful art student. Told partly from the sociopath’s perspective. That’s my jam! I should have loved this book! But something left me cold. I suppose it may have been all the bitching and complaining the beautiful art student did in her stupid diary.
What a helpless twit! Not to imply that I’d be brave and cunning or anything In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d be a helpless twit as well. But I’ll be goddamned if I’d expect anyone to enjoy readi Impotent sociopath kidnaps beautiful art student. But I’ll be goddamned if I’d expect anyone to enjoy reading the daily chronicles of what a helpless twit I’d been. The ending really made me smile, though.
The creepy ending made it all worthwhile. Crazy fucker. View all 25 comments. Jan 25, Fabian rated it really liked it. This novel is over fifty years old! Though its semi predictable, the end is nonetheless terribly terrific. That there are two strands of narrative is sometimes a revelation, sometimes an encumbrance like living through a terrible ordeal not once but twice!
Both psych This novel is over fifty years old! View 2 comments. So much for starting the year with a literary bang. This novel made me feel like a dud firework. I didn’t find it chilling or claustrophobic. Not once was I creeped out. It did however leave me feeling rather sad, after the glum ending.
What I could really do without right now. As soon as the narrative went from the perspective of the possessive kidnapper to the diary entries of the young woman held captive, I was starting to lose interest. Alright, to start off with anyway, I liked reading of h So much for starting the year with a literary bang. Alright, to start off with anyway, I liked reading of her attempts to outwit him and get away, but it just wore off eventually.
It may be a case of a decent book that I just happened to read at the wrong time, I don’t know. I could think of only a few scenes between Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman that did more for me than the whole of this novel did. I was going for three stars, but considering I really struggled to finish it, it’s more likely somewhere around two I’m afraid. As a first novel the writing was pretty good, and that is about all the positives I can give it.
I felt nothing for Frederick. Didn’t feel pity for him. Of course I felt sorrow for Miranda. Poor girl. So, not a great reading experience at all for me.
I can’t say that I’m that interested in butterflies, but I would rather this had actually been about some nice lovely butterflies, and not feeling locked up.
I’ve had enough of that already! View all 20 comments. Shelves: eek-the-creepies , full-of-wonderful , owned-ebook. He wants me living-but-dead. He makes preparations by buying a house out in the country, purchasing assorted objects and things he knows she will need, convinced that if he can only capture her and keep her that she will slowly grow to love him.
The first part of the novel was told from Frederick’s point of view and it was rather alarming at his thought process. In his mind, there is nothing morally wrong with what he intends to do and what he actually ends up doing. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content. Read more Read less. Customer reviews. How customer reviews and ratings work Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. Top reviews Most recent Top reviews. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. One of my favorite books! So glad I could find one with a good price. One person found this helpful. Good read. Excellent copy. Condition and edition exactly as described.
See all reviews. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations. Back to top. Clegg is where this book lives. The peeks inside his mind, while presented as normal thoughts on his part, are truly chilling to us readers who are sane. I shivered to read some of the things he was thinking. These psychological tics and the detached way in which they were presented were what made this book great. You can see how I’m torn here between being unsatisfied, while at the same time finding some portions of The Collector to be outstanding.
To today’s jaded horror readers? This might not be the book for you. But to fans of stories like Silence of the Lambs, or even Red Dragon, I think this book will appeal, even though some of the themes are a bit outdated. It’s to them that I recommend The Collector. View all 23 comments. Oct 19, Bonnie rated it it was amazing Shelves: full-of-wonderful , owned-ebook , eek-the-creepies. He wants me living-but-dead.
He makes preparations by buying a house out in the country, purchasing assorted objects and things he knows she will need, convinced that if he can only capture her and keep her that she will slowly grow to love him. The first part of the novel was told from Frederick’s point of view and it was rather alarming at his thought process. In his mind, there is nothing morally wrong with what he intends to do and what he actually ends up doing.
She writes about G. To Miranda, G. At first I had a hard time determining the relevancy of these recollections, but it essentially just became another disturbing piece of the story to see how influential G.
Always sneering at him, jabbing him, hating him and showing it. But linked destiny. Like being shipwrecked on an island—a raft—together. In every way not wanting to be together. But together.
Suffice it to say, it gave me goosebumps. It was not the ending I had anticipated, but I still felt that the author was successful in creating the everlasting effect I believe he intended. View all 48 comments. Jun 25, Lisa rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-to-read-before-you-die.
And I answered: “It is not about that at all, and it is one of the most suspenseful and scary novels I ever read! One just rarely thinks of the fact that you kill them and pierce them with a needle to be able to look at “Oh”, said a friend, taking this novel off my shelf. One just rarely thinks of the fact that you kill them and pierce them with a needle to be able to look at their beautiful wings at your leisure instead of chasing after them flying free.
So the cover and title say it all, just not straightforward. I guess this book made me a strong supporter of butterflies’ right to fly View all 9 comments. May 30, Michael rated it it was amazing Shelves: unreliable-narrator. One of the first dark psychological thrillers–at least in modern times though depending on how you categorize them, James or Poe or even some of the ancient Greeks might usefully be described this way, too.
A tale of obsession and art and butterflies–need I say more? Wonderful for those who take their fiction black. What’s especially interesting here is the sheer banality of Frederick’s evil. He kidnaps Miranda, then doesn’t really know what to do or how to relate to her as an actual person One of the first dark psychological thrillers–at least in modern times though depending on how you categorize them, James or Poe or even some of the ancient Greeks might usefully be described this way, too.
He kidnaps Miranda, then doesn’t really know what to do or how to relate to her as an actual person instead of as an object. View all 7 comments. Dec 19, Peter rated it really liked it. That was quite an interesting piece of fiction. A collector of butterflies is obsessed with a girl and finally kidnaps her when he comes to a fortune. She desperately tries to escape her remote prison and the relationsship between those completely different characters is shown in an impressive way.
There is a kind of narration by the male character and one of the female character, the victim, in form of a diary. I won’t spoil the ending but this read was quite captivating. They characters in his That was quite an interesting piece of fiction. They characters in his novel come from different walks of life and the sub-plot is exactly about society and Caliban like characters. Many allusions to art and literature delight the well read reader. I’ve never read any novel like this before.
Clearly recommended! View all 4 comments. Jul 04, J. Other reviewers have said what I would say about The Collector. It’s haunting, disturbing, and impossible to forget once you’ve finished. While not a typical “horror” story, it is one that probably occurs more often in the real world than not, and the person s involved could be a distant relative, a sibling, a son or a daughter. Allow me to state right now that it’s not an easy read. As someone who derives enjoyment from books of this nature, I was determined to remain objective from the onset.
I wanted Frederick to earn my disdain, just as I wanted Miranda to garner my sympathy and support. Little did I know just how masterfully John Fowles would pen the book. Written in four sections, you are given Frederick’s POV, then Miranda’s via her diary , and finally two final portions of which the last seems like an epilogue. The format doesn’t seem to be all that special, but in truth, it is what makes The Collector so powerful — your emotions, quite literally, are used against you.
Frederick is a gentle — yet, due to his fears and compulsions, dangerous — man. In the beginning, you want to understand his desire to earn Miranda’s “love. Even more tragic is that as much as you dislike Miranda I’m ashamed to confess this, but almost the entire portion written from Frederik’s POV I didn’t care for her when it’s her turn to speak, you are presented an entirely different picture — of a girl with hopes, dreams, and the realization that the choices that were of such importance in her life — namely her inability to choose to reveal her love for another man, as well as her faith in God — are made all the more heartbreaking in light of the predicament in which she finds herself.
Of course, when you delve into the third and fourth parts, it’s just devastating. It’s disturbing in a multitude of ways, but it’s the ending that drives the final nail in the coffin no pun intended. Suffice it to say, those last few words gave me chills and even now I can’t stop thinking about them. Feb 22, F rated it it was amazing Shelves: uk , Loved – so creepy! View all 3 comments. A great pal of mine, who shall remain nameless, is a collector.
Truly and obsessively one. His house is filled from floor to ceiling with records and CDs and other bric a brac. It’s a very large, sprawling ranch with a half floor up as well as a basement. It should be a spacious and roomy abode, but when you walk in there it’s like squeezing through the Fat Man’s misery section of Mammoth Cave – you have to turn sideways to get through.
He shares this space with a half dozen cats. It’s filthy. R A great pal of mine, who shall remain nameless, is a collector.
Reading this, I wondered too if he might have a lady squirreled away in the basement, but dismissed this notion. There is simply no room down there to do any such thing, every inch is piled with stuff. He compares himself to the Collyer brothers see Wikipedia , whose obsession with collecting proved fatal. And so it is in Fowles’ “The Collector,” but how that is so constitutes a spoiler. There were no spoilers in it for me, as I’d seen the William Wyler film for the first time in the early ’70s on TV, and I think what caught my eye and kept my interest then was lovely Samantha Eggar, as Miranda, a role in which she was well cast.
I think she captured the character of the book. I’ve since seen the movie again and it holds up, though reading the book I think that Terence Stamp may have been too glamorous looking to play the role of “The Collector. Hers approach to the telling of it, which is not the strategy of the film, that simply incorporates both these into a straightforward narrative. So yeah, I’m reading it and the story seems to end halfway through and I begin Miranda’s diary and I begin to think, goddamn, I have to read this story all over again?!
Son of a bitch. But it’s a very clever trope and in many ways Miranda doesn’t make a very good case for herself in her diary account. She’s young and arrogant just the kind of snob that the collector ascertains. None of this justifies what he does to her, of course, and that’s one of the strengths of the book, toying at the readers’ sympathies for both characters. They’re both unlikeable, and yet one feels for both of them. The collector has a complex repressive psychology – he knows what he wants, but doesn’t.
And she is highly impressionable, as her accounts of longing for her insufferable mentor, the Picasso-like womanizing artist, G. The battle of wits here is good, and is well handled in the movie as well. I had hoped that Fowles would not have stated so obviously through Miranda’s voice that the collector was someone who treated her the same way as the butterflies in his collection, in such an aloof way, under glass, suffocating and snuffing out what he supposedly loved.
This is easy enough to glean without the author’s help. And this is the way I feel about my friend, the record collector – he has tens of thousands of LPs, but cannot play them, won’t listen to them.
How can one ever choose from such a collection? Merely the having of them sates him, for the moment, for he is never sated. What does he want out of it? He doesn’t know. He has the object, but can’t ever fully appreciate the true essence of what’s inside it – the music. And so it is with the collector, whose idealized view of Miranda trumps the reality of who she is. So, yes, this is a great story, well and cleverly told in plain language, often with thoughtful insights.
And yet, somehow, I never felt like I was in the presence of great literature – even though I felt I was in the presence of a writer capable of it. Perhaps the dispassionate tone of the collector’s account made me feel this and yet Graham Greene is largely dispassionate and I feel great passion in his work.
Fowles’ partisans suggest that “The Magus” is his great contribution to literature, so someday hopefully I can check that out. Anyway I’m still absorbing what I’ve read, so all the aspects of the book I’d like to comment on will likely be unstated.
I tend to move on.. View all 5 comments. When a book is being lauded as some kind of bible for a number of murderers and serial killers, then of course it will attract my attention.
The Collector follows a butterfly collector who diverts his obsession with collecting onto a beautiful stranger, an art student named Miranda. I was so sure The Collector would become a new favourite, the premise is deliciously dark and disturbing, a man obsessed with a woman, intent on kidnapping her and making her fall in love with him.
I felt like I just wanted it to go further The first half is fantastic, as we are inside the mind of the collector, Frederick. But the ending is pretty strong, so you do finish on a high note! All in all, really glad I read it. Incredibly well-written and crazy addictive for the most part. Oh boy what did I just read?! This was most definitely a strange sinister and creepy story. Beyond the obvious depraved strangeness of the whole scenario he had no backbone!
Nothing going for him. Strange strange. Obsession, power and a beautiful captured butterfly in the form of Miranda and you get a wicked little story with plenty of arty metaphors to chew on. I almost loved this book but not every second of it. The story flagged for me once the perspective shifted to Miranda. View all 16 comments. This was a little weird and slightly uncomfortable but throughly entertaining and memorable.
It’s hard to believe that after so many novels and films about sociopathic kidnappers, I would still be shocked by a book written in the early 60s. The Collector is a traumatizing novel about a guy who kidnaps a young woman, although Clegg is not your typical kidnapper and Miranda is by no means your typical kidnapee. What really makes it exceptional is the uniqueness of the two characters and how this shows through the alternating narratives. It soon becomes clear that neither of them is totall It’s hard to believe that after so many novels and films about sociopathic kidnappers, I would still be shocked by a book written in the early 60s.
It soon becomes clear that neither of them is totally reliable and what truly matters is what each decides not to tell as well as how they do or don’t tell it. Once more, Fowles builds his characters in perfection. The way they both struggle to gain power over each other is thrilling and the reader is in a constant effort to understand the motives behind their deeds.
There is also a powerful symbolism here, as Frederick and Miranda represent two opposite forces that were both blooming in England at the time.
Old vs new, modern vs archaic, art vs lack of it, imprisonment vs freedom, and ultimately, as Miranda puts it, The New People vs The Few. Miranda is the power of life and art is the ever-blooming means through which it is expressed.
Nothing is served in a plate in The Collector , which makes it truly rewarding in the end. Although, by then, you will probably be too numb to actually feel anything except a growing sort of uneasiness.
It’s heartbreaking in the least cheesy way imaginable. The idea, the execution, Fowles’ extraordinary portrayal of the characters’ psychologies, its darkness and all those feelings it gave me are worth nothing less than all the stars I can give.
Jul 24, Richard Derus rated it really liked it. Real Rating: 3. It was a dark and stormy day in Austin, Texas, in This book deeply unsettled me, left me trying to comprehend what the heck I was experiencing. What a great way to get a something passionate reader to buy all your books! Now, reading them This was the oldest book of hi Real Rating: 3. This was the oldest book of his I could find after reading A Maggot , which also blew me away.
But these words, this exceedingly dark book, this awful nightmare of an experience from Miranda’s PoV anyway was just so very very unsettling I couldn’t go deeper into this strange and disturbing psyche.
I might not sleep, and that’s a lot more serious a problem than it was in my 20s. Have fun, y’all. Feminists: Avoid. Dec 22, P. An adept stalker is keeping you up to date with his observations. An amateur lepidopterist, he is now on the hunt for a completely different species. And make no mistake, he is acutely methodical about putting down the evolution of his fixation. Let us call him Fred. Fred’s father, a travelling salesman, died on the road when he was 2.
His mother went off shortly after her husband died, leaving Fred to his uncle and aunt. In turn, Uncle Dick died when F. From now on, he is taken care o An adept stalker is keeping you up to date with his observations.
From now on, he is taken care of by Aunt Annie. A remarkable example of helicopter parenting, of the prig sort, and lives with his resentful disabled cousin.
Apt combination for a decent, lasting guilt trip. Later on, Fred comes to work some time as a clerk in the Town Hall Annexe. Fred wins out a formidable sum of money in the football pools. Then, Fred quits his job and is able to indulge in any of his whims and fantasies.
He decides to buy a country house, one hour from London. Then in turn to adbuct Miranda and keep her captive in the cellar until Miranda grows fond of Fred. The book is divided in 4 parts, mostly 2 sections : the narrative from Fred on the one hand, Miranda’s diary on the other hand.
Fred I found compelling the way John Fowles designed Fred’s personality. A general, cursory portrayal could be : grandiose but outwardly polite, mildly quaint, meek, subdued even.
For starters, he is a nostalgic, or better, he seems to be stuck, in the past or somewhere else. Also, from the beginning he is intending to keep past events under constant check. Fred holds very clear-cut, sharp opinions on people, some of whom you should dispose of. A natural-born voyeur, he likes photography and enjoys some occasional smut, that is, when it is unnoticed by Aunt Annie.
Clinical, judgmental, Fred thinks lowly of everyone ; he looks down on lots of fellow humans and coworkers which, by the way, he does not consider he belongs to. Yet, these are not the most alarming traits and behaviour Fred harbours, miles from it.
They have yet to surface. Self-deceiving, looking for reasons, pretending and telling himself stories, rationalizing and never doubting he can tell the right from the wrong. You can’t figure out Fred, he hardly can himself.
– The collector 1963 book free
Back in the day, I didn’t grade this book because I wasn’t sure, after reading it, that it was actually a Phantom-inspired novel. While it shares a big old heap of the same setup the collector 1963 book free themes, the author had addressed the idea slightly in one of his commentaries and claimed that it was intentionally crafted for his own commentary rather than following in the shoes of Leroux’s. However, it нажмите для деталей so much of the same territory and does so so brilliantly that I reviewed it anyway, and after more consideration, I’m not sure I really believe Fowles, to be honest.
Either way, I’d happily point anyone who enjoys Leroux’s story toward Fowles’ with a glad heart. Part The novel opens with a quote from La Chatelaine de Vergia lovely medieval French romance about a knight and his forbidden lady love. I, too, am in love, pretty much instantly. The line ” Que fors aus ne le sot riens nee ” translates roughly to “And no one knew but them”, referring to the hidden romance between the main characters.
That this should chill the reader down to the marrow of his or her bones is not readily apparent yet, but it certainly will be later. There are a great number of parallels between this story and Leroux’s, though not always in expected ways. The main character is Frederick, a lonely lower-class accountant and amateur entomologist who sees the lovely Miranda, an art student, from afar and becomes obsessed with her. The parallel to Erik’s obsession with Christine is clear, as are the similarities in description between Christine and Miranda blonde, blue-eyed, pure and innocent, delicate, etc.
Other areas are obviously less related, such as the fact that Frederick does not attempt to set up any kind of mentor relationship with Miranda, instead the collector 1963 book free watching her and daydreaming about her from his office building across the street. Frederick himself is a terrifying character, which again is not immediately apparent at the beginning of the book.
Fowles uses style as a clue, delivering all of the narration for Part One in a stilted, halting, and unembellished fashion that mirrors Frederick’s own lack of grace and imagination.
The only thing that he ever appears passionate about is his hobby; he collects butterflies and goes to great lengths to capture especially impressive specimens or rare mutations.
Using the word “passionate” to describe him is not really accurate even in this context; passion is a very foreign emotion to this character, who the collector 1963 book free the majority of the novel grasping after it or believing he is experiencing it while being very demonstrably detached from true emotional involvement. Frederick is quite simply incapable of really understanding or having any empathy for other people as having emotions similar to his own, but he understands society well enough that he attempts to respond appropriately anyway and in no way ever realizes that his outlook is out of the ordinary.
Frederick’s obsession with Miranda is initially fairly innocent; he enjoys watching her, daydreams about one day meeting her and even about living together in a house, where he constructs sunny scenarios of himself collecting butterflies while she paints them in brilliant color. The only moment the collector 1963 book free hints at a darker undercurrent occurs when he sees her begin going out on the town with a young man and his fantasies occasionally turn more violent, involving her begging him for forgiveness or even including occasional violence against her.
The parallel to Erik’s sudden turn off the deep end after the introduction of Raoul is also notable. It becomes clear that Frederick is the collector 1963 book free a normal dude throughout the first part of the novel, but since it is told from his point of view and Fowles is a master of subtle prose, it occurs in a sort of slow-motion creeping that eventually forces the reader to confront the uncomfortable feeling of something being wrong.
Numerous asides that make no sense to us yet occur, usually involving Frederick claiming whether in desperation or flatline matter-of-factness is open to interpretation, as the intentionally blank prose provides few clues that he never planned things to happen the way they did or that nothing that went wrong was his fault. A lengthy interlude also establishes that he considers himself asexual and disdains the “crudity” of humanity’s mating urge; his only sexual experience is a failed encounter with a sex worker, which he ends the collector 1963 book free before it begins out of repulsion it’s hard to tell if he’s repulsed by the idea of the sex act, or by the sex worker herself.
Despite this and his frequently-expressed disgust for “deviancy”, Frederick purchases a lot of pornography; his obsession with photographs and, representationally, life distilled into perfect stillness will be a major running theme.
It’s clear that Fowles download r for windows Frederick’s asexuality to describe him as in some way incapable of relating to other human beings “normally”, which is not surprising since this the collector 1963 book free was the collector 1963 book free in the early s but is still disappointing. A much less subtle clue to his the collector 1963 book free as social outsider is his outright statement that he thinks that Mabel – his wheelchair-bound cousin, with whom he has been brought up as siblings – should be “put down” painlessly, a belief he applies to all disabled people in order to save them and their families needless difficulty.
The fact that Mabel’s disability makes him uncomfortable is the driving motivator; there is not the collector 1963 book free a whisper of empathy or even recognization of the emotions or challenges that she must face because of it.
Another major theme, one that is key both for this novel and in Leroux’s, is that of class lines and social striation. Frederick is very blatantly from a lower social class than many other characters in the novel, a fact betrayed occasionally by his style of speech but more frequently by his own antagonistic musings against the higher classes and their “airs” and “affectations”.
His deep, almost instinctive resentment of the higher classes is only intensified when he wins a large amount of prize money; not only is he predisposed to hate them because of his less than privileged upbringing, but he immediately senses and resents the fact that being “new money” does not automatically cause the “old money” to accept him as one of their own.
One of the major things that attracts him to Miranda in the first place is that, the collector 1963 book free her being born into a more privileged class, she displays very little affectation and seems to ignore the social lines he is so adamant about delineating; whether or not this is true or merely a facet added by his admiration of her is impossible to tell, since he seldom gives meaningful examples and Miranda herself has no place in his narrative. Frederick is the very epitome of an unreliable narrator, and the longer his drawn-out introduction goes on, slowly revealing his distressing detachment and intensifying the foreshadowing that something the collector 1963 book free is going to happen at the end of the story, the more skin-crawling he becomes for the reader.
Frederick’s fantasies grow slowly more involved, in some casting him in the role of a hero rescuing her from some antagonist so that she falls in immediate gratitude-motivated love with him; from there, he makes a sudden leap to kidnapping her, though he never uses such ugly words to describe it to himself as the перейти на источник reiteration of “it wasn’t my fault” and “I didn’t plan it” highlight, Frederick is a master of denial and never allows anything that might make him question himself to stick for long.
He describes it instead as keeping her at his house “in a nice way”, in the hopes that she will eventually choose to marry him. For those familiar with the Phantom story, his explanation of his motives rings eerily familiar: “I thought, I can’t ever get to know her in the ordinary way, but if she’s with me, she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand. There was always the idea that she would understand. Without the deformity, a physical and concrete motivator for shutting himself off from others, Frederick does so out of choice in order to avoid their ridicule often exemplified by a co-worker who makes fun of his weekend “dates” with butterflies instead of girls.
Even this bears close resemblance to Erik’s withdrawal, however; both characters consider themselves to be every bit as human and deserving as the rest of their society – in many ways superior, in fact – but choose to wall themselves off from it and focus on their disenfranchisement rather than deal with a world that does not appreciate them.
Of course, in Erik’s case, a very visible disability that causes others to autodesk education 2018 free him is a pretty strong motivator for avoiding people; in Frederick’s, the complaint is simply that people don’t like him and he doesn’t appreciate that, and his one-sided narrative conveniently ignores any of the reasons others might have to have difficulty socially interacting with him. Frederick’s obsession with Miranda continues for literally years before the main action of the novel starts; he carries it throughout her teen years until she moves to London for art school, whereupon he becomes somewhat rootless and lethargic in her absence.
Even during this period, during which he claims he almost forgot about her, his fixation is all too strong and apparent to the reader. The continuous repetition of the idea that he never planned to do anything becomes more and more obviously denial the collector 1963 book free he takes trips to London to find out where she hangs out and intentionally covers his tracks, just in case someone might be watching for him.
The most damning moment comes when, while looking for a house to buy, he purchases a country cottage after seeing the double cellar it contains and thinking idly, he insists about how easily the sub-basement could be converted into a living the collector 1963 book free for a captive. The sub-basement setup is again very reminiscent of Leroux’s story with its descending layers of underground, and the fact that the second basement was originally a Roman chapel adds a layer of worshipfulness to the proceedings, an outward expression of Frederick’s borderline-religious idolization of Miranda that is again very reminiscent of Erik’s the collector 1963 book free of Christine.
Another brilliantly illuminative line occurs when, in reference to the cellars and what occurs in them later in the story, Frederick says, “It was two worlds. It’s always been like that. Some days I’ve woken up and it’s all been like a dream, till I went the collector 1963 book free again. The matter-of-factness and complete lack of moral qualms, worry, or even the decency to admit what he is doing to himself carries the reader in a state of agitated apprehension as Frederick rebuilds the collector 1963 book free furnishes the sub-basement specifically as if he were planning to keep a “guest” down there.
The juxtaposition between him populating it with ladies’ clothing and books on art at the same time and in the same unvarying tone as he furnishes it with several redundant layers of security designed the collector 1963 book free keep anyone from getting out further serves to drive home his complete and intentional detachment between the ideas of Miranda as a “friendly guest” and as an unwilling prisoner.
The momentum of the novel, which by this point the collector 1963 book free practically barreling toward his actions, the collector 1963 book free increases when he also purchases a van, guts and outfits it with restraints, and spends some time experimenting and familiarizing himself with chloroform before booking himself a rotating and untraceable battery of hotel rooms around the art school Miranda attends.
The actual scene in which he kidnaps her, luring her toward his van by mentioning an injured dog he has struck before chloroforming her and tying her up, is almost a release of tension, but the reader that assumes the situation must be resolved soon the collector 1963 book free in for a long, intense journey.
It is almost startling to actually see Miranda interact and begin to do things once she regains consciousness and finds herself a prisoner; having seen her only through the lens of Frederick’s obsession, the reader has been tricked into viewing her the same way he does and is accordingly surprised when she turns out to have a personality of her own. It’s an exceptional personality, as well: smart, sassy, savvy and brave, she is a wondrously strong female character and a perfect analogue for Leroux’s Christine, just as unwilling to give up and ready to refuse to tolerate indignity.
Frederick is most certainly surprised, as his fantasies did not include her strenuous rejection and demands to be released, and even though he continues to cling to his idealized vision of her, the reader can see the first moment of their interaction as the moment that the strange and horrible innocence of his dreams the collector 1963 book free shattered.
It’s an inverted version of the scene in which Christine discovers Erik to be a man rather than an angel; in both cases, приведенная ссылка sudden realization that the dream is merely coarse reality is jarring and life-changing. Interestingly, Frederick, when asked his name, tells her that it is Ferdinand.
While it’s not surprising that he might want to set himself into the role of her lover Ferdinand being the prince that eventually marries Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempestit is another moment of very obvious disconnection when he informs us in his narrative that he “doesn’t know” why he said it.
He is incapable of admitting it even to himself, hiding even now from the knowledge of what he увидеть больше doing; in a different character this might be a sign of guilt, the collector 1963 book free in the stupendously guilt-free but undeniably orderly universe Frederick inhabits, what it really is is an unwillingness to confront the fact that he has done something that he knows was fundamentally unacceptable.
At various other times, he reiterates occasionally to Miranda herself that he believes that many more people would do the same thing he is doing if they had access to money the way he does, a statement that is less true than it is rationalizing.
He is not bothered by his own foray outside society’s rules enough to stop doing it, but he is bothered enough to have to convince himself and Miranda, if he can that what he’s doing is perfectly natural after all. Miranda, being the spirited girl she is, will have none of his dissembling, and quite finally puts an end to his romanticizing of his behavior by snapping, “Ferdinand. They should have called you Caliban. The bulk of the book occurs now, and it is a sometimes-interminable sometimes-unbearable journey through the enforced interactions between Frederick and Miranda.
Fowles is never boring, nor is he anything but brilliant in his writing, but the sheer weight of the emotional content and the ever-present sense of doom make it a hard read nevertheless. Despite his earlier musing on Miranda’s “classlessness”, Frederick very quickly blames her higher class the collector 1963 book free for her apparent inability to calm down and be reasonable about having been kidnapped.
He seldom approaches the level of resentment he reserves for most people of her echelon, but his sullen thoughts http://replace.me/9919.txt that the two of them could never overcome the class barrier no matter how hard he tries or how much she lies about it note, again, that the idea of Miranda doing anything active never even crosses his mind, both because of his download and install quicktime on 10 to conceive of her in empathetic terms and because of her status as representative of the higher class.
More to the point, Frederick’s belief in his own disenfranchisement rears its head in an especially ugly manner when he brings the idea of his own entitlement into the equation: having never had much in life before winning the money he’s using to do this, he’s making up for it now, and the implication that Miranda, as the upper-class representative, owes it to him to love him is doubly frightening because he doesn’t in any way recognize why the idea is so unpalatable to her.
Many, many, many derivative Phantom-based works also play on the idea that Christine somehow owes it to the Phantom to love him back, both because of the depth of his emotions and because it wouldn’t be fair to continue to deprive a man who has had so little in life; Fowles shows us in stark, unignorable contrast how very horrible that idea is. Miranda, for her part, alternately loathes and pities Frederick, who spends most of his days in the basement staring contentedly at her no matter what she might be doing.
Their dynamic is, like Erik’s and Christine’s, very reminiscent of the Greek myth of Hades kidnapping Persephone; Frederick’s obsession with freezing life into unmoving death and knowledge, symbolized by his butterfly and photograph collecting, is in direct opposition to Miranda’s lively and life-celebrating organic art and desire to directly experience things.
Frederick is capable of seeing and desiring that liveliness in her, but ultimately he knows of no other way to express that desire except to possess her, which of course kills the very lively qualities he so prizes, just like killing a butterfly to add it to a collection. Frederick’s inability to really express his emotions is his most marked difference from The collector 1963 book free Erik; where Erik could create Don Juan Triumphant and write music to mirror his soul, Frederick has no such outlet.
Instead, his butterflies are his means of expression, but even they are unchanging and dead. It was hard for me, as a reader, to decide over the course of the novel if this made him less frightening than Erik, whose passions and their expression were frequently horrible or lethal for those around him, or more, since his stolid lack of any kind of expression made him all the more internally dangerous and unpredictable.
Fowles actually plays to us a little bit in here, though not quite to the extent of breaking the suspension of realism; Miranda herself comments on Frederick’s didactic and clinical way of speaking, saying that he takes all the color out of words and language when he uses them.
The narration is indeed dry as dust, and Fowles reminding us of it clues the reader in to the fact that it’s not just authorial style but an actual facet of Frederick’s character. Frederick is somewhat incapable of understanding why Miranda is afraid the collector 1963 book free him despite her various attempts to explain; since he believes himself to be in love with her and has no plans to hurt her, he finds her reticence and apprehension confusing.
Miranda herself is much more cognizant of the fact that, inevitably, the situation is going to spiral out of control, and she’s unhampered by the unflinching veil of denial that Frederick conducts all emotional affairs from behind. When she says, “What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you It’s lurking somewhere about in this house, this room, this situation, waiting to spring. In a way we’re on the same side against it,” it’s with brilliant clarity that tells us that she understands him far better in some ways than vice versa.
An interesting feature of their relationship – and one that is again mirrored by the characters of Leroux’s novel – is the fact that Frederick consistently and instinctively places The collector 1963 book free upon a pedestal that he can’t aspire to in fact, the idea of aspiring to it would be entirely foreign to him.
It’s an automatic reaction that is partly motivated by his miring in the muck of his observation of class lines – he can’t help but place her above him no matter how much the idea might provoke resentment, because instinctively he assumes that she is above him – and ссылка, once again, by his tendency to freeze and immortalize the things he wants to look at, making perfection out of them in a way he can’t achieve for himself.
When she stamps her foot in frustration and declares, “You always squirm one step lower than I can go,” she is being truthful: no matter who she verbally castigates him or refuses to appreciate his behavior, he always automatically assigns the blame to himself rather than to her not that he feels guilt; he doesn’t, but he does acknowledge that it must be something he has done.
When it becomes clear to Miranda that he intends to keep her in the basement for an indefinite period of time, she responds by going on a hunger strike; having discovered that he isn’t holding her for either ransom or the collector 1963 book free favors, the collector 1963 book free the simplest and most elegant way of threatening to take what he wants – her presence – away from him. This is also a confusing event for Frederick, who can’t understand what her constant fussing is about when he’s gone to so much trouble to provide her with books and music and food and clothing.
In an attempt to stop her from starving himself, and as a result of her continual begging and pleading, he finally agrees to let her leave in four weeks if she will behave herself as his guest.
Miranda does keep her promise and her escape attempts and tantrums become less frequent, but Frederick, who had адрес on her falling in love with him by the end of the four weeks, finds himself growing more and more desperate as time begins ticking inexorably closer. Finally, his ultimate plan is to propose to her on the night before he is scheduled to release her; with chillingly cold calculation, he notes that she will stay of her own free will if she says yes, and that if she says no he will have a reason to punish her by refusing to let her leave, placing the blame for the decision squarely on her shoulders no matter what she does.
It’s difficult, once again, to pinpoint whether it’s more disturbing that he plans to not only continue holding her captive but blame her for the collector 1963 book free so, or that he genuinely believes that there’s a chance she might say yes to his the collector 1963 book free. Miranda is too honest for her own good, so she refuses and is condemned to the basement again after the collector 1963 book free very disturbing interlude in which she tries to run, he chloroforms her, and then he removes all her clothing except for her underwear after putting her back in her room as usual, the motivation is not overtly sexual, though the reader is confronted by hints of undercurrents that Frederick is not admitting to and the implication that he can only desire her when she’s unconscious [i.
The novel is gaining momentum again, the reader feeling the pressure of her continuing and continually helpless attempts to escape and Frederick’s own slowly-building irritation at her behavior.
By the time Frederick is frequently comparing Miranda to a butterfly – a beautiful emerging imago, soon to be in her full splendor – the metaphor is almost unnecessary except to most fully presage the disaster we know must be to come.
Ironically, when Miranda entices him into a game of charades to pass the time and she pretends to be a butterfly, he is unable to guess, incapable of recognizing her lively, fluttering version of the creatures he keeps pinned in glass boxes.
An important theme is crystallized here when Miranda, frustrated by her inability to get Frederick to display any kind of empathy, outlines the difference in their outlooks by presenting them as differing spectrums. For Miranda, an artist and free spirit, the continuum of life runs from the ugly to the beautiful; anything beautiful is worthwhile for its own sake, while anything ugly is to be shunned.
She’s not talking about specifically physical beauty, but the collector 1963 book free about artistic contribution or things that make the world better in any form.
For Frederick, on the other hand, the continuum runs from evil to good and has almost no space between; he judges everything in life according to his own criteria and labels it as one or the other, as neatly and unfairly as he labels the butterflies in their boxes.