The Collector (1 cent)

The third short book I read on our short Florida trip was John Fowles' 1963 book, "The Collector", the story of a young asocial butterfly collector, who stalks and kidnaps an attractive young girl, secreting her in the basement of a country house, where he fantasizes about her falling in love with him. The book starts as a first person account of the events leading to, and following the kidnapping; I thought this (and at this time the book) rather worthless. Then it switches to the victim's diary, where you see the same events from her point of view, along with aspects of her young (but intellectually precocious) life. This was the best part of the book, and makes reading it worthwhile. In this age of focus on kidnapping and prisoners, I thought that Fowles captured the emotions of a kidnapping victim very well. Of course I also thought that the victim was a much more interesting character than the perpetrator.

A movie with Terrance Stamp was released in 1965; it won a number of awards, and I would like to see it.

And, I would like to know if the heroine of the book (Miranda) is a somewhat older Lolita, and if the butterfly collector is a somewhat younger Nabokov. There are significant differences of course, but enough common grounds to make you wonder what was really on Fowles' mind.