Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: I had to read this book for my Honors World Lit. class last year, and it was truely one of the best books ive ever read. Fowles splits the book up into to parts, the first half is through "Ferdinand's" view point, and the second half is through Miranda's. This allows more depth, along with the ability to understand the characters and what was going on in there minds when they did certain things, like stalking miranda and kidnapping her. i never saw the end of the book coming, it was like....wow......i couldnt put this book down so i finished it about 2 weeks before everyone in my class did (all of which agreed that it was an excellent read) and as i sat in class reading other books i would occasionally look up and see the expressions on my classmates faces as they came to some of the most shocking parts, especially some of miranda's responses to fred's love.
Rating:
Summary: Great one
Review: A young woman is abducted by a man who's grown obsessed with her in the previous months (or years), and wants her to fall in love with him too. But once she's in his power, he is at a loss what to do with her ..
The story is told from his point of view, and then hers, which provides the reader with a distorted yet deeply interesting account of the same events. John Fowles's observations are very cruel but also very, very true - people like Frederick, his hero, can never fit in. They can only use violence to serve their own purposes - but even that does not always work - as you cannot force somebody's mind .. in the story, the woman never acts as he expects or would like her to, and it's very obvious she doesn't belong to his world, and never will.
Which can only lead to tragedy, even if people don't want things to end this way.
The plot of the Collector reminds me of stories by Edogawa Ranpo or Ernesto Sabato - I remember the former wrote a weird novel about a masseur using women's bodies to fulfill his desire for Perfect Beauty.
That said, Fowles mostly reminds me of the best writers/analyzers of the human mind like Kellerman or Mac Ewan.
But he's also a great writer of his own right .. I first read the Collector more than 10 years ago, when I only was in my early teens ... and it's still as good as it was at the time.
Rating:
Summary: Tell Tale Heart is nothing compared to this
Review: The Collector is an eerie and lingering tale of the dark side of the wish to possess beauty. The story is somewhat Kafkaesque in its gloom and sometimes teasing tone. Of course it is also about the naivete and the nature of beauty which is, of course that it is ephemeral and fleeting and not always desirable despite the almost universal wish to be born with it.I found this book and the image even more disturbing than the Tell Tale Heart and The Penal Colony. To be completely dependent upon a force that is alien and quite mad is one of those most terrible captures. I believe this book is in some ways highly a child of its century as Kafka and Poe's works were of theirs. An essential and unforgettable experience.
Rating: 
Summary: good psychological thriller
Review: This book is divided into the abductor's point of view and the abductees. I was very drawn into it for the abductor as he described the difficulty of keeping his prisoner. Once I read about the girl and her thoughts, I hoped he would kill her. I won't spoil it for you. She needed to die though.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful Storytelling
Review: Set in London, Fowles takes us on a journey through a young man's dimented mind, whilst glimpsing into the dreams of an intelligent young girl. It pulls you into a tug of war over good intentions and obsessive romance. After stalking a young girl for some time, Fred Clegg fianlly "pins" her to the floor of his 17th century cottage's cellar. Beware of feeling sypathy for the wrong person... A good read, enaging, suspenseful, and mischevious. Not for the squeamish.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and chilling!
Review: This is an absolutely chilling book about the nature of evil. Every time I read it I am awed by Mr. Fowles' uncanny ability to depict the emptiness and passive-aggressive violence of the male villain and his utterly egocentric inability to see the female victim as a human being; attracted to her vibrance and beauty because of his own soullessness, he sees her merely as an object he is compelled to possess. He cannot understand that complete possession means death; the pinning of the "butterfly" destroys the very passion and aliveness which he longs for in the first place (Mr. Fowles has portrayed this fundamental lack of understanding about the meaning of love and the resulting confusion of love with ownership better than any other author I've ever read). Once captured, his apathy and inner ugliness slowly smother the life and joy out of her; she tries to give him what he wants by sharing her spirit and passion with him, but he only speaks the language of dissection. Eventually, like a flame deprived of oxygen, she is snuffed out. The villain is incapable of feeling emotion for anyone but himself, and because of his refusal to face his own murderous desires, he views the kidnapping, imprisonment and death as a series of incidental or serendipitous occurrences which he did not perpetrate, but was simply the observer of. In this way he absolves himself of any guilt, allowing him to remain dead inside. And so he must try again...
There is a great deal of tragedy in this book, and I find myself crying every time, with a mixture of horror and deep sadness. There are many parallels that can be drawn between this story and the history of humankind's conquest of nature, or male oppression of women; the layers of meaning are rich and thought-provoking. One final thought: if you ever meet a man who identifies with the villain (as some previous reviewers seem to have done, which is absolutely frightening) - run and don't look back!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Too long...
Review: The concept of the book is quite interesting (although far from being new), but the content is repetitive not very interesting to read: after the first 100 pages you understand more or less what will happen next, and what really happens next would fit 50 pages while is presented on 200. Well, maybe the length and the style of the book is a part of the depressive impression the author wanted to leave, but I think he's gone too far.
Rating:
Summary: Deepest Heart of Darkness
Review: No book plunges deeper into the heart of darkness than John Fowles extraodrinary first novel, *The Collector*. Patrick McCabe's *The Butcher Boy* comes close, but Freddy Clegg is the banality of evil given unwilling flesh with none of the operatic violence of McCabe's psychopath. His slow descent into murder is all the more frightening in that it is not a descent at all but a revelation, of the consistency of his alienation and sociopathy. I've seen complaints that Freddy's tedious blandness is boring reading. My sympathy. I don't remember to clearly my first reading (I just read the book for the third time over the Millenium weekend), but I still read hoping, hopelessly, that he will crack somehow, that something will break through his crazed porcelain surface to a human heart. The astonishing thing about the book is that it is not, in any sense, an exercise in sadism. Miranda's suffering is never enjoyable; Freddy's cruelty is never attractive. I always felt that the movie erred in casting a vaguely attractive person like Terence Stamp for the role, and early paperback covers depict a similarly romantic figure. Freddy begins as a non-entity, as heroic as Eichmann, and he descends from that depth to a degradation, an abdication of humanity that is absolute. Miranda reminds me, in her vulnerability, of a statue I once saw at the Denver Art Museum. The artist was doing three-dimensional photorealism. He had sculpted one model as a sleeping nude so lifelike that she was startling. But his wonderful gem was a lifesize sculpture, also nude, of the same model standing up, staring back at us, her body language conveying so unambiguously the helpless humiliation of being nude in a room of the clothed, that she was unbearable to look at. I stayed at the exhibit for a quarter hour just to watch the embarrassment and discomfort of the patrons confronted by this image. It is brilliant book, *The Collector*, an absolutely flawless portrait of alienation and sociopathy, an exercise in tragedy. What a wonderful beginning for a brilliant novelist's career.
Rating:
Summary: The Collector: A Thrilling Novel
Review: A gripping masterpiece novel by talented storyteller, John Fowles, The Collector proves to be a worthwhile read. A tantalizing tale about a psychotic butterfly collector who kidnaps a young beautiful girl and traps her in the basement of his house, this novel's plot is both interesting and gripping as a somewhat spellbinding psychoanalytical thriller.
Set in London, The Collector unravels as an insightful novel because it divides the book up into two main sections with different narrators. The first is told from the point of view of the kidnapper, Clegg, who is a mild-mannered, dangerously wealthy psychopath, who is intensely fascinated with women, in particular, a bold art student, Miranda. The latter half of the novel is told through the diary entries of Miranda during her imprisonment in Clegg's basement cell, where she desperately tries to escape from throughout the course of novel.
This particular arrangement of telling the story is attributed to the brilliance and sheer talent of Fowles, a widely celebrated author who allows the reader to observe the thoughts and actions of an estranged kidnapper and also sift through the pages of Miranda's diary, where she pours her soul and energy into her morals, thoughts, emotions, and plans for escape onto paper-- making her come alive, both as a good-hearted human being in an impossible situation, and also as the ill-fated victim and "beautiful butterfly" that Clegg has collected and stored as his own.
In fact, Clegg's character is so unique and puzzling that at times you don't know who to feel sorry for-the helpless victim, Miranda, who is subjected to unthinkable treatment for no fault of her own, or for Clegg, a thoughtful and lonely man, whose desires and vulnerabilities lead him to a path of mortal destruction.
From Clegg's intriguingly twisted thoughts and notions about society, life, wealth, and women, to Miranda's not-so-humble opinions of art, culture, social upbringing, and romance, the characters never fail to leave the reader with an assortment of thoughts to digest while progressing through the plot.
The main portion of the plot consists of the interaction between Miranda and Clegg, prisoner and kidnapper, and the various issues the two deal with and are exposed to due to the clear definitive difference in personalities, social classes and status, education, personal interests, and moral upbringing.
The book follows the plans of both parties, desperately clinging to their own very separate hopes and ambitions that inevitably lead them to no good. While matters of sex, trust, betrayal, love, art, and culture are debated between the two, the forced relationship wears thin on both ends, and Miranda's eventual condition is what finally ends her imprisonment in Clegg's dungeon-like cell.
The novel definitely hits on some core issues still prevalent in today's society while showing the distorted mind of Clegg and the tortured mind of Miranda's, making this novel all the more engaging.
Rating:
Summary: Probably the best of all J.Fowles books
Review: Not only a tense psychological thriller, but also a food for thought on such topics like philosophy of art and creativity. The way book is broken into two parts one of Miranda and another of Fred and written in diary form gives it another dimension. Two parts of a book in their writing styles look like they were written by different people, this only proves great talent of an author. The whole book is an opposition between methodical, shallow, restricted world of mad person (who rationalizes all of his mad behavior) and creative, liberal and free nature of his victim. Good psychological study of charaters!
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