The Collector Collector
by Tibor Fischer

Rarely is the hero of a novel not a human being; even more rarely is it a bowl. Pots, urns, vases, ceramics, earthenware: the history of the literary uses of such receptacles, antique and ersatz, is a sorry one. Occasionally you get a Keats, a Stevens or a Plath, ambling by to take rubbings of some useful metaphors. But in this lurid, psychotropic comedy, Tibor Fischer uses a bowl as his narrator. It is an antique, a Sumerian: the Ur-bowl, compared to which all other priceless examples are mere fakes. Ceramicking along consciously for thousands of years, it’s seen it all. Now, in modern London, it finds itself in the hands of Rosa, a 26-year-old art expert who can see into its soul. True diviners of this sort being rare, the bowl is caught off guard, but manages to fob Rosa off with choice stories from its Technicolor mytho-history, while telepathically interrogating her own past, chocka with failed sex and disappointing boyfriends.

Imagine: what you know as inanimate artefacts are spying on your life. It’s a coruscatingly good idea. Through the bowl’s eyes we watch the disruption of Rosa’s life as Nikki, a dishonest nymphomaniac backpacker (”Slight with bite. Her body is her office”), comes to stay, organising burglaries, seducing strangers and nicking the bowl itself several times. Rosa tries to fend off the attentions of disgusting old wealth-hoarder Marius, who wants to buy the bowl; she also takes regular trips to see the agony aunt whom she has imprisoned down a well. If the abysmal old hackette can’t apply her talents to Rosa’s specific frustrations, why should she enjoy her freedom? Meanwhile, Nikki’s past is catching up with her, in the shape of a terrifyingly huge, yet mystically gentle, woman called Lump, who has condor’s wings attached to her white leather jacket.

What is a bowl to do? Although it can piece itself back together after being shattered, and in extreme situations morph to an entirely different appearance (say, that of a Bengal tiger), it can’t actually talk. For most of the novel it is a mere observer, although as the plot veers into serial-killer territory near the end, it furnishes a handy deus ex amphora. As if in satirical exaggeration of the motto of a certain Grecian urn — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — the bowl, whose character is that of a Nabokovian monomaniac, has spent most of its existence obsessively cataloguing the varieties of human seductions, falsehoods and physiologies. “Of bosom, there are two hundred and twenty styles, of buttocks, two hundred and eighty-four. I order. I know. I do my job.” This is in keeping with the amusingly neo-Polonian seam in the bowl’s psyche, as it periodically offers gnomic nuggets of abstract wisdom culled from its vast experience, eg: “As a child puts everything in its mouth, so man puts everything in rules.” This prideful ceramic (who, incidentally, has a grudge against arrivistes such as Gorgon vases) is always at the epicentre of history: it takes dominion everywhere.

But the bowl also has a sweetly poignant, romantic side. The fables it shows us during Rosa’s interrogations, about ancient rainmakers, telescope-wielding voyeurs, unpredictable love in tiny villages, are the most charming part of the book. Like the stories of the great Italian fabulist, Dino Buzzati, they are short and ironic, but mostly evince a guarded optimism about the tribulations of love and life. By comparison, the increasingly frenzied machinations of the contemporary plot begin to pale in pleasure. As anyone knows who has read Under the Frog and The Thought Gang, Fischer is a wordsmith of unique, eccentric brilliance, and his prose here is still startling, although the mania for phrasemaking rhymes is beginning to look a little unhinged. Though very short, this book is three sketchy novels stuffed into the space of one, and one hopes that Fischer is not about to disappear up his, admittedly bewitching, linguistic fundament. Still, The Collector Collector is lewd, creatively hilarious, and weirdly moving: the sort of novel you’d be intrigued to find sitting on your shelf, watching you in pregnant silence.

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