A review by Ania Ziemba, 11th grade

Good books have a duty to the reader: to engage them in an emotional sequence of decisions and events they wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. One such book that has had a great impact on me is “The collector”, by John Fowles. The story follows a lonely young man with a passion for collecting butterflies, who falls in love with an art student and kidnaps her, keeping her in his basemen while he tries to get her to fall in love with him.

The characters’ decision to kidnap her makes sense to the reader: he’s a butterfly collector who’s learned that the beauty he appreciates in these creatures has to be preserved and loved in captivity. Although the decision isn’t counter intuitive, the rest of the book gives a good account of how a person that lives in complete isolation and has little identity tries to find love and value In his life. Through the authors’ writing style, which gives the reader a desperate silence sort of fell, I learned how loneliness feels at its extreme: how the character lives in a fantasy that he perpetually twists, because he doesn’t know how to integrate himself in the real world.

The decision affects him greatly. We can see a progression in his attitude towards it: first, he’s full of anxiety, paranoia and excitement, but these feelings gradually neutralize as he finds confidence in his ability to hide his tracks and as he grows into the idea that the exciting love affair he imagines was exaggerated and that the woman he admired was a real person, with faults and autonomy. To the reader, it seems like the character was fed up with the experience by the end of the book, but the last few pages seem to indicate that this isn’t a decision he won’t make again.

I strongly recommend reading this book, since it helps you understand how an isolated person tries to create a reality he can live in, mirroring what he knows about the real world into this twisted puppet show-like play which will surely give you chills.