Do you have that one friend that keeps more than one collection or when he or she is fed up with one, his or her mind has already irrevocably settled itself on another project? They might not even notice it, but… it’s happened again, he or she is keeping another one, just like one maintains air in its lungs. If that case applies to you… well, I wouldn’t advise you to read this, because you can get a seed for an idea for yet another “collection” and this one isn’t exactly legal. On the other hand, if you do have a friend like I’ve just described… this story will make you look differently towards that same person, it could be good or bad, but definitely different.An appallingly banal butterfly collector wins a lottery and sees himself freed from the constraint of his familiar bonds. Afterwards, he kidnaps a young neighbor he’s been observing for most of his life, an art student – Miranda.This book was hard to put down, it describes the imprisonment period in such a delicate way from the kidnaper’s point of view and then Miranda’s desperation tells a completely different story. The young woman dwelves into his mind and purposes deeper and deeper in order to regain her freedom, but solitude and stimuli deprivation take their toll on her, mesmerizing her into an abyss of hours, minutes, seconds. The beautiful way Fowles has of portraying each character and the polarizing way they deal with their emotions throughout their confinement together makes this a very peculiar (perhaps frightening for some other readers) read. I found Caliban a very interesting character, it was quite challenging to find “the human” in his distorted perception of life (and yet not so strange at times) and to see it through the eyes of a snob-ish full-of-life dreamer, whose wings are paralyzed by fear (and something more?).
