Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
The story is pretty simple. Frederick is a lonely man with little in his life but his aunt and cousin and his collection of butterflies. When he wins a fortune, it occurs to him that he longer needs to limit himself to butterflies. The beautiful woman that he has admired from afar can be his. He can take her beauty and have it all to himself. So he does.
And the ending! Oh, the ending. I can’t think of any way that I would change it. Absolute perfection.
When I first finished The Collector, I gave it 4.5 stars for some nagging feeling that the section of Miranda’s writings was just a little too long. Three weeks later, though, and the book is still haunting me. I still find myself thinking about just how clever it was and how disturbing the closing paragraphs were. Any book that has that kind of effect has got to have 5 stars, really.
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Date finished: 10 January 2016
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Format: Paperback
Source: Gifted for Christmas – thanks, Laura!
Genre: Literary Fiction; Classic
Pictured Edition Published: in October 1998 by Vintage
Originally Published: 1963
On finishing this, I remembered that I also owned The Magus by John Fowles. Has anyone read it? Recommendations for other similarly disorientating books are welcome too!