John Fowles is dead at 79

What can one say about John Fowles? I first read him at 16 and was immediately swayed away by the sheer force of The Collector. The magic of turning the pages has never given me a palpable sensation of being overtaken by such imagination, such mastery of telling. (If you ever read The Collector, you too then understand, why turning pages in that book was so mesmerizing, especially the last ones...)

When I finished The Magus in 30 hours of non-sleep, sit-through heroic effort for somebody who did not even know how to spell subjunctive, I fell asleep and then, once, awake, immediately started reading it again. It was the third reading that made me think, that I was getting very closed to obsessions with somebody's fantasies of the world.

The All-Union State Foreign Languages Library in Moscow did not have that many of his non-fiction books, so I had to wait patiently for the new ones to come out. Daniel Martin, The Ebony Tower and then, then there was Aristos. I bought 6 copies of that book and gave them away to anyone who cared to think about this world and one's place in it.

By the time Wormholes was published, I knew John Fowles was very ill, so I made sure to see him, to hear him talk while he was still alive, still traveling. My mom (who does not speak a word of English) came to visit me in New York that day, so in order not to choose between filial obligations and the chance to see Fowles live at the 92nd Y, I took her with me. She stoically sat through a 2 hour conversation, while I was in heaven, listening to the musing of the most wicked, well-read, bookish, erotic mind of Britain.

Couple of month ago I purchased a first (un-revised) edition of The Magus, so I am looking forward to reading it again, now that I read Shakespeare in English, now that I can recognize some of the allusions, now that I know there will be no further variants of that amazing story.