{"id":11184,"date":"2018-09-08T15:38:11","date_gmt":"2018-09-08T05:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=11184"},"modified":"2018-09-28T08:07:39","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T22:07:39","slug":"six-degrees-of-separation-where-am-i-now-to-the-collector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=11184","title":{"rendered":"Six degrees of separation: ‘Where am I now?’ to ‘The Collector’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The blog Booksaremyfavouriteandbest<\/a> asks once a month if we can find links between books in six moves. I like this kind of challenge. My thoughts often drift irrationally from one thing to another and I curse myself for not being able to stay on one brain path. But analysing my links between the following books helps me see there are indeed connections, be they gossamer-thin. September’s starting point, as suggested by Kate from the blog above, is Where am I now?<\/em> by Mara Wilson.<\/p>\n

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I ended up at The Collector<\/em>. Let me take you there:<\/p>\n

1. I haven’t read ‘Where am I Now?’ but I immediately knew the little girl on the cover. It’s Matilda<\/em><\/strong>, from the movie of the book by Roald Dahl. Of all the movies Mara Wilson was in as a child actor, the name Matilda stuck with me because I wanted her to be Australian, but of course she was American.<\/p>\n

2. And that was because Matilda made me think of Waltzing Matilda by Banjo Paterson and a book that includes some of his songs and stories called Bush Songs, Ballads and Other Verse<\/em><\/strong> that I picked up at a garage sale.<\/p>\n

3. It came with a matching volume, Best Stories<\/em><\/strong> by Henry Lawson. ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is the opening story which I use when tutoring to help new Australians get a taste of our history and the harsh life for women who were left alone on the land to raise children and fend off snakes.<\/p>\n

4. As I sat in sadness over drovers’ wives, I thought of another fictional woman who had to go it alone with her child, the protagonist of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em><\/strong>, by Agnes Bront\u00eb. I’ve read it twice.<\/p>\n

5. And another book I’ve read twice with a theme not unlike The Tenant, is The French Lieutenant’s Woman<\/em><\/strong> by John Fowles. The movie with Meryl Streep is one of my favourites.<\/p>\n

6. This brought to mind The Collector<\/em><\/strong>, also by John Fowles, a book about a creepy guy who collects butterflies and enjoys pinning them into display cases to admire them. But then he collects a young woman and traps her like a butterfly. I listened to this book in the car on a long trip and at a particularly disturbing part I stopped at a caf\u00e9 for a break where on the wall were multiple pictures of individual butterflies.<\/p>\n