Product Description

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 history from the last 5000 years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81157 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport in 1959 of Hungarian parents. Brought up in South London he was educated at Cambridge and worked as a journalist. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his first novel, Under the Frog, which also won the Betty Trask Award, and he was nominated as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

Customer Reviews

Endlessly inventive and entertaining
This is a novel written from the point of view of an antique bowl that "collects" (or, more accurately, catalogues) the people that collect it - hence the title. From this fanciful "fly on the wall" perspective, Tibor Fischer constructs an endlessly inventive and entertaining tale. In the main narrative people that appear normal later turn out to be deranged in a variety of interesting ways, and those that initially appear to be bizarre turn out to be behaving quite rationally. As if the interplay of characters in the present day were not enough stimulation, the book is liberally spiced with flashbacks into fantastical highlights from the bowl's observations over the previous 4000 years. The only flaw (if it is one) is the bowl's tendency to assign everything to ranked lists (e.g. "I equivocated about whether to place her at 133 or 132 on my list of people-readers"). This is initially amusing, then irritating, and finally ignorable. Overall, highly recommended.

Don't judge a book by its cover (or its synopsis)
This book looks pretty uninteresting, and the synopsis reads very strangely indeed. A book narrated by an antique bowl is not one I would normally think of reading. Suspending my disbelief however was very rewarding.

An inanimate object makes an excellent narrator because, as the bowl itself observes, people don't notice it and act in ways in which they wouldn't in company. Also, the bowl is full of interesting and amusing anecdotes about the things it has seen in its long and varied 'life' which take over the narrative at times and stop monotony setting in.

The bowl, besides being a raconteur, is a philosopher and something of a magician. There are plenty of ceramic observations on the human condition here!

I'm sure this still sounds far too strange a book to consider reading, but it's definitely worth a go. The plot which revolves around the bowl's latest owner, her 'flatmate', a butch guardian angel and an obese tycoon is entertaining in itself.

A must for antique dealers and anyone from Market Harborough.

Unlike anything I've ever read.
Authors often struggle to write from anything other than their own viewpoint - men rarely write well about female characters, Europeans struggle with African ideas and so on. To write in the character of another species is heroic (any offers?) but to become inanimate yet sentient is the sign of a certifiable loon. But what a loon! At least the pseuds can't accuse you of being "inauthentic". Free from the strictures of existing, the bowl treats us to a feast of sublime observations. You will be left in no doubt of man's peripheral place in the world after this. A winner for the existentialists and misanthropists alike.