Katariina Kottonen’s Reviews > The Collector > Status Update

‘This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can’t be with us. We don’t want them to be with us. We don’t want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can’t respect them.’ (2/2)

‘They’re all the same, women like her. It’s not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven’t changed, we’re just young. It’s the silly new middle-aged people who’ve got to be young who’ve changed.‘ (1/2)

The change in perspective is done extremely well; not because it is, in part, a retelling of the same events through a very different experience, but because Miranda’s thoughts are not just about the events, and so her account is not a repetition.

‘And it was twice as difficult with her, because I didn’t want to kill her, that was the last thing I wanted.’

Foreshadowing, absolutely.

I believe I am about to leave the part dedicated to preparations (which leave the reader guessing how that choice or this memory will resonate later on in the text) and enter the heart of the matter — of darkness, if you will.

‘After I got it dried out I put several layers of insulating felt and then a nice bright orange carpet (cheerful) fitting the walls (which were whitewashed).’

An easy tell that the book was published in 1976. I can see that carpet.

The first few pages read as a very credible account of an infatuation, still coloured tender at the edges, still theoretical when at its dangerous.

The protagonist is not devoid of a sense of duty — or honour; attuned and sensitve to the behaviour of others when directed at himself, yet often devoid of sympathy (or empathy) in return. (1/2)

‘[Que] fors aus ne le sot riens nee’, translating roughly to ‘[And] no one knew of it but them’, a line borrowed from La Châtelaine de Vergy, an anonymous 13th-century romance of courtly love.

Curious beginnings.