The Collector Collector

Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector is a bizarre anecdotal curio of laugh-out-loud absurdity and ridiculousness.

Suspend your disbelief because this book is anything if not surreal and bizarre. Narrated by a 5000 year old Sumerian bowl who catalogues its collectors over its potted history, the book follows its relationship with its latest owner, Rosa who manages to imbibe stories from its past, swathes of hilariously inaccurate history that due to the bowl's inanimate nature allow it to observe rather than interact and ultimately gives its own ceramic views on the human condition.

The bowl tracks the three main characters: A hypochondriac millionaire art collector, Marius, who carries fire extinguishers with him wherever he goes; the sultry and parasitic kleptomaniac, Nikki, master of the imaginative lie; and owner Rosa, the uncomfortably-single art appraiser who just happens to be holding a lonely hearts' columnist hostage at the bottom of an unused well.

The book is written in a bizarre scatological way and sometimes the narrative is overtaken by the bowl's historical tales, all revelling in the absurd, tangential and irrelevant of human conditions. Fischer is engaging and amazingly always in control of such a disjointed and surreal story, filled with brilliant one-liners and funny japes.