| Title | : | Jitterbug Perfume |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1842430351 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781842430354 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 342 |
| Publication | : | First published December 1, 1984 |
Jitterbug Perfume Reviews
-
Well, I officially don’t get Tom Robbins. People have recommended him on the basis of comparisons to
Douglas Adams, but Adams is, you know, funny. Here’s what seems to pass for humor in a Tom Robbins novel: beets (the very existence of), a woman getting stung in a delicate place by a bee, and lesbians (the very existence of). And here’s the kind of prose you can look forward to:
The sky, layered with thin altostratus clouds and smog, appeared to reflect human suffering and failed to awaken in Claude visions of paradise. (Page 13)
The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur. (Page 36)
With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck, the city, for the first time in memory, would have an unobstructed view of one of nature’s most mystical spectacles. (Page 47)
When Claude glanced at the sky, he saw that the text of
Les Miserables had been painted over by Salvador Dali. The sun was so round and glossy and black that had it a figure eight on it, well, it would have validated a lot of long-standing philosophical and theological complaints, underlining once and for all just where we earthlings sit on the cosmic pool table. (Page 81)
A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation. (Page 201)
And of course:
Above Seattle, the many-buttocked sky continued to grind. (Page 312)
And that’s just me culling annoying descriptions of the sky. Imagine 350 dense, unrelenting pages of this crap. I never thought a book about immortality—one of my favorite subjects—could ever inspire in me such a desperate desire for it all to please just end. -
Do you smell that? Most ingenious alternative indie writing ever.
That´s Robbins´closest encounter with some fantastic elements, not just letting the characters and their actions be the center of the show, but adding a second higher, meta line to the whole thing, next to the usual subtle criticism.
A journey on the search of immortality leads to meeting the god pan, slowly killed by Christianity in ancient times, finally a second time terminated by economics currently and in the future to make sure sure that he´s dead, going through time periods of the past, while different present plotlines are combined with the ancient origins of higher powers. This jumping between the mythological and current events accelerates the plot towards an even more suspenseful read than other of Robbins´ novels, of course not forgetting to add philosophy, criticism of culture and traditions, and loads of filth and dirt as one is used too. Although it highly depends on the readers´attitude if one sees it as a celebration of love and sexuality or as too heavy and sticky pulp.
The mixture of low instincts, down to the earth sex and sometimes violence, and extremely subtle irony, analyses, innuendos, and deep thoughts is what makes Robbins´ work so unique. The sex factor level and explicitness stay constant over his career, while his criticism level is developing from full frontal rebel anarchism to owning the establishment by showing them their immense stupidity by ridiculing everything with well balanced irony or in your face sarcasm. Readers who can´t handle that stark contrast miss the chance of unique, mind penetrating reading experiences that mix deep thoughts with horniness and the one or other grain of horror.
Funny that we don´t know much about our senses, especially smell, in contrast to hearing or seeing that can relatively easily be physically analyzed, while the disgust or pleasure of nasty or wonderful plumes is still a bit of a mystery. The animalistic origins are clearer, but higher human brains have added associations, memories, feelings, etc. to the once just delicious nom nom sniff sniff sense, opening the option that there could be much more behind it than with look look and listen listen, that aren´t so directly and physically penetrating the body and mind.
Because such a deep drag doesn´t just infiltrate the brain like a sound or a color does, but combines emotional with a physical response, it opens up many more possibilities than just one´s occasional spliff. Shamans knew this for millennia, some of the audience may have experienced it themselves, and besides the fantastic applications of entering other dimensions that are just open for extended consciousnesses, the future tech, biochemistry, pharmacy, nanobots, etc. transporting the right ingredients to the best places, etc. might perfect the culture of micro or macro dosing everything.
This is what fantastic realism could and would look like if European authors wouldn´t be eccentric egomaniacs who don´t care about the reader and just produce pseudo sophisticated, fringe philosophical, illogical, boring reading terror.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph... -
Before I knew that magical realism was a thing, I loved Tom Robbins. Before I fell hard for postmodernism, I fell for Tom Robbins. Before I had developed a literary taste that I can be proud of, there was the beacon of hope for me that is Tom Robbins.
There aren’t many things I loved in high school that I still love now: Listening to the same Dashboard Confessional CD on infinite repeat, running to Livejournal to unselfconsciously document every oh-so-significant spike in my emotional temperature and wearing brightly colored tights under fishnet stockings are all things I’ve let slip into the past but Robbins has seen me through all the milestones and minutia of my teenage and twentysomething years.
Jitterbug Perfume was not my first foray into the weirdly wonderful and wonderfully weird worlds that Robbins builds from the gossamer threads of imagination unbound (I'm actually not sure which one popped my Robbins cherry but I do know I first read this one during my last summer of college when I was a live-in nanny -- which was a surprisingly good summer for bibliomania, actually). It is, along with Skinny Legs and All, tied for the honor of being my favorite of his, and both novels are longtime mainstays of my desert-island reading list. So when my craving for Robbins got to be too demanding to be delayed any longer and the heady of perfume of spring was calling too loudly for the only companion novel that successfully captured the power of scent in words, I knew I could rely on this book to deliver everything I needed and more.
It is tempting (like, it is taking an inordinate amount of self-control to fight the impulse) to say something about how beets are the beating heart of this novel but that's only because I have a sick, unironic penchant for puns. Really, this is a story that spans 1,000 years (or about as long as I've been staring at the computer screen while waiting for this review to write itself C'MON BOOZE LUBRICATE MY THOUGHT PROCESS NOW) and connects Seattle to New Orleans to Paris to Bohemia of yore with the wafting of a fragrance. There's also a very loyal swarm of bees serving as the halo a modern-day Christ figure would wear and Pan comes and goes to prove that man creates and destroys gods with a fury and jealously no spiritual figurehead would ever dare to act on. And a fallen king who proves that love can last more than a lifetime and winds up behind bars in the process (if that's not a metaphor for modern times, I don't know what is).
...
You know, I thought a little liquid creativity would help me here but it is just so damn hard to express how much and why I love this book and how excited I am that, almost eight years later, it is actually even better than I remembered. This is so much more than beautifully playful prose, a caution against taking oneself too seriously lest you forget to stop and smell the beet pollen, more inventively evocative metaphors than a whole hockey team could shake some really long sticks at -- just to mention a few of the things that established my seemingly eternal entrenchment in the Tom Robbins fan club so many years ago. That's not to say that I wasn't thoroughly tickled by those elements this time around but the more subtle aspects of the storytelling were what really got to me during this most recent reading.
This book is a little disarming because it addresses so many issues, Big Ticket and otherwise -- life, death, love, immortality and the conflicted yearning for it, what happens on the other side of death, the individual vs. societal norms, the search for perfection, scientific pursuits, religion (and the lack thereof) -- in such a lighthearted, unexpectedly connected way that its moments of seriousness pack a brutal but enlightening punch. A character who triumphs over death for a good millennium is bound to lose more than he gains in his willful longevity, and his moments of introspective contemplation are a little hard to watch unfold, especially as some of the other characters are revealed to be carrying around the kind of sadnesses that compel them to keep moving; I can now appreciate that there is a definite Pynchonian element of contrasting goofiness of the highest order against some truly sobering sorrows to maximize the impact of each emotional extreme.
I was a little worried that, like so many things I've outgrown, my love of Robbins's unique storytelling might now be a thing of the past tense. But he so intricately layers and pieces together so much in his books that there is plenty to notice for a first time (like how Jitterbug Perfume really does follow the format of a hero's journey, complete with help of and hindrances from mythical beings, a never-say-die determination to reach the finish line, the occasional occurrence of wine-dark liquids, and even a visit from a cyclops) and even more to rediscover anew. -
«Όταν γεννιόμαστε είμαστε κοκκινοπρόσωποι, στρογγυλοί, έντονοι και αγνοί. Μέσα μας καίει η πορφυρή φλόγα της παγκόσμιας συνείδησης.
Βαθμιαία, όμως, καταβροχθιζόμαστε από γονείς, μασιόμαστε από σχολεία, τρωγόμαστε από συμμαθητές, καπνιζόμαστε από κοινωνικούς θεσμούς και ροκανιζόμαστε από τις κακές συνήθειες και τη ν ηλικία.
Κι όταν πια μας έχουν μηρυκάσει και χωνέψει αυτά τα έξι στομάχια, βγαίνουμε από μέσα τους σαν μια ενιαία και αηδιαστική καφετιά μάζα.
Το δίδαγμα, λοιπόν, του παντζαριού είναι το εξής: Διατηρήστε τη θεϊκή κοκκινίλα σας, την έμφυτη ροζ μαγείας σας, ειδάλλως θα καταλήξετε καφέ.
Έτσι και καταλήξετε καφέ, ξέρετε τι σας περιμένει: καφές, καφετζούδες, χαρτορίχτρες, τσαρλατάνοι, ψυχοσωτήρες…»
Ολοκλήρωση μεγαλειώδους, πανοργασμικής, υπερτέλειας, εμπειρικής, μοναδικής και πρωτότυπης αναγνωστικής διαδικασίας, επιτυχής!!!
Παίρνουμε ολόκληρο το λογοτεχνικό λεξιλόγιο της οικουμένης, τα μεγαλύτερα προβλήματα που απασχολούν την ανθρωπότητα απο καταβολής κόσμου εως σήμερα, θρησκείες, φυλές, συναισθήματα, αρώματα, σκουπίδια, θησαυρούς, φιλοσοφίες, ανάγκες, απολαύσεις, δικαιώματα και αρκετά ανθρώπινα χαρακτηριστικά ανάμεικτα.
Τα τοποθετούμε μέσα σε ένα γυάλινο μπλε μπουκάλι.
Οι δόσεις είναι κατά προσέγγιση ισόποσες. Πασπαλίζουμε το περιεχόμενο του μπουκαλιού με αρχέγονες αισθήσεις, μυθικές θεότητες, έντονες σεξουαλικές απολαύσεις, μυσταγωγικά βαθύ ύπνο και εξελιγμένη συνείδηση.
Ανακατεύουμε με αιώνες άχρονου χρόνου απο την Μεσοζωική Περίοδο μέχρι την τελευταία τεχνολογική ανακάλυψη, εκστάσεις και εκτάσεις χώρου απο γήινο ή αστρικό έδαφος, συμπαντικές εκρήξεις, μνήμες, εικόνες, εμμονές, επεξεργασίες εκατομυρίων πνευματικών ετών, εφιάλτες, άγριες ηπείρους, ανταριασμένες θάλασσες, πολιτιστικά θεμέλια, διαλογισμούς, επιφωτίσεις, εγκεφαλικό φλοιό και μπόλικη άνθιση μετά απο φωτοσυνθεμένη συνείδηση.
Συμπληρώνουμε στο μείγμα μας χρώματα ��πο λαχανικά, γεύσεις απο φρούτα, μυρωδιές απο την παγκόσμια ερωτική αίσθηση της οσφρητικής ικανότητας, ψευδαισθήσεις, αγάπη που εκφράζεται με απόλυτο μίσος, αλληγορίες απίστευτες, παρομοιώσεις πρ��τάκουστες, μεταφορικές εκφράσεις ζωής μαι θανάτου, καυστικό κατακκόκινο χιούμορ, πίστη σε απίστευτα φαινόμενα, θεσμούς, αξίες, χίπικες ιδέες με γιασεμί και φόνους, αναρχικά πιστεύω, υπερβολές κοσμικής ευφορίας, χαμόγελα, τραγικές και ανυπέρβλητες ηδονές, ζωώδη συνειδησιακό υπόβαθρο, συμβολικό επίπεδο ανθρωπισμού και προσκαλούμε έναν τραγοπόδαρο κερασφόρο, εωσφόρο να ερεθίσει με την λαγνεία του το μείγμα μας.
Βοημία, Σιάτλ, Παρίσι, Ν. Ορλεάνη, Ελλάδα, Αίγυπτος, Τζαμάϊκα, όπου έχει ανθίσει λουλούδι, όπου έχει ευδοκιμήσει καρπός κάθε είδους, όπου έχει γεννηθεί ζωή ερπετών, θηλαστικών και ανύπαρκτων πλασματικών μορφών που εντοπίζονται απο την μυρωδιά τους και μόνο.
Όπου υπάρχουν ζωντανοί και νεκροί οργανισμοί κάθε εξελικτικής μορφής, ερωτισμός, εκκεντρικότητα, μαγεία, δύναμη, ατελείωτη αιώνια αγάπη, σαπίλα, κατεστημένο, ομορφιά, αγνότητα, χιλιάδες σημασίες...
Κλείνουμε με φελό το γυάλινο μπουκάλι μας, αφήνουμε το μείγμα να αφομοιωθεί απο τον εαυτό του και χύνουμε το υγρό πάνω σε λευκές σελίδες βιβλίου.
Το αποτέλεσμα, θα είναι απάντηση σε ό,τι κοντινότερο μπορεί να υπάρξει, σε ό,τι
μπορεί να φανταστεί κάποιος για το τί, κατά προσέγγιση, είναι το «Άρωμα του Ονείρου».
Τώρα που έζησα και απόλαυσα τη γραφή του Ρόμπινς, μπορώ να πω ειλικρινά πως τον γουστάρω ζωηρά και τρελά.
Είναι ένας αριστοφανικός Τζόκερ. Ένας επικός τραγωδός με στολή κλόουν.
Ένας προκλητικός, σαρκαστικός, μεγαλοφυής, εξερευνητής.
Ένα πυρηνικό όπλο γεμάτο ραδιενεργά, αρωματικά, χρωματιστά, πεζογραφικά ταλέντα. Που σε φυλακίζει. Σε γοητεύει. Σε κυριεύει με απόλυτη τέχνη.
Ατίθασος, αστείος, μοναδικός στο είδος γραφής που σε ρίχνει μέσα σε λάσπες και βρομιές και σου μαθαίνει να κάνεις με αυτά απίστευτα σχήματα σκέψεων και χρωματιστές μπουρμπουλήθρες
με αρωμα ονείρου ...
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς. -
Told to read this by my boyfriend who declared that I NEEDED to read this book to understand him, I am now disgusted and reconsidering my relationship. Ok, I'm kidding, but I take solace in the fact he read this book in high school.
Oddly enough, my best friend also said this is her favorite book.
Either I'm surprised to discover I'm a prude, or Robbins wastes way too much of a promising book on misogynistic fantasies of all women as nymphomaniacs who live and breathe to seduce and pleasure their usually significantly older male partners. The only relationship that didn't annoy me was between Priscilla and Ricki, and even that one was sexually focused. I don't mind reading about sex, in fact I rather enjoy it if done tastefully, but I feel that the overwhelming sexual descriptions took away from the substance of Robbins' ideas. I found myself rolling my eyes throughout most of it and was even embarassed when a man in a plane commented on my book choice, noting that another author he reads is "like Tom Robbins if he had a heart."
I give it two stars because Robbins is clever (maybe too clever) and funny and I feel that the ending made up for what was lacking earlier in the book. Or maybe I was just glad to be done with it. -
post-read: Ohhhh, I really missed reading Robbins. What fun!
This book was both more and less wonderful than I'd remembered. More because I'd forgotten just what a superb stylist Robbins is (see mid-read comments). His plots are intricate, his characters are rendered in wonderful detail, down to the distinctive vocal stylings. His ideas, though perhaps a smidge stale twenty-five years on, are still interesting and fun and clever and smart, intellectual, but not in a showy or pedantic way. Plus there's that anxiety you get when you're, oh, twenty or so pages from the end of a book, thinking There's no way he can pull it all together satisfactorily in so few pages! But he does! It's a tiny bit cheesy, maybe just a wee bit pat, but c'mon. He had an awful lot of balls in the air.
Less for a few reasons. I'd kindly blocked out the fact that everyone in a Tom Robbins novel sooner or later launches into a discourse that sounds exactly like Tom Robbins, which can get pretty annoying. Also, I forgot how letchy he can be. There's a lot of sex in this book – in fact, it's one of the four pillars of immortality – which is fine; it's just that the descriptions of it are often a bit much. ("Alma hiccupped the mushroom scent of his spurt," ex, not to mention lots of glistening, semen-encrusted thighs, and that sort of thing.)
The other thing, which isn't really bad or good, exactly, is that I think Tom Robbins is kind of a victim of himself. He's too much Tom Robbins sometimes. Too hippie-cliché; too cerebral-in-an-understandable-but-trippy-way; too specific with his characters, to the point where they become caricatures that are hard to take seriously; even, sadly, too over-the-top with his metaphors ("his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodpecker drilling for worms in a poker chip"? Are you kidding?); just too... too much.
I guess taking a few years off between Robbinses allows one to forget these drawbacks just enough to come back to him fresh and be able to enjoy his shimmering originality again.
mid-read: It's not that I'd forgotten, exactly, but no one does metaphors like Tom Robbins. For example: The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the snowy landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur. Fuck, really??
pre-read: Last night I made the most amaaazing beet salad. And this afternoon, as I was pondering a middle ground between all the new new new new things I've been reading and something (Proust) too, ah, weighty to take on vacation, I saw my little half-shelf of Tom Robbins. I can't believe I don't have
Another Roadside Attraction, but I thought I'd maybe check out this one, which I haven't read in like a decade.
The whole book is about beets!!
And oh my god, how have I not read Tom Robbins in so long?? He is so fucking cool. -
Are you kidding me with this? Nothing more than pseudophilosophical flim-flam that's too clever again by half. It's too crude to be taken seriously, too serious to be dismissed out of hand.
I loved every minute.
4 stars. Especially recommended for Discordians and Illuminatus! fans. -
'Parfümün Dansı' gelmiş geçmiş en kült eserlerden bir tanesidir ve bugüne dek bir fırsat bulup okuyamamıştım. Sonunda bu açığı kapatma fırsatı buldum. Değdi mi? Bence, değdi. Okumuş olmaktan pişman olmayacağım, lezzetli bir kitaptı.
Kitabın konusundan bahsetmek boşuna bir çaba olur. Zira uygalık tarihi, mitoloji, dinler, kültürler, gelenekler, modernizm, kapitalizm ve daha başka bir sürü süreç eserdeki öyküye o kadar güzel yerleştirilmiş ki sadece ana öyküyü aktarmak, eseri birkaç kalibre düşürmek olur. Alobar karakterinin çizgisel hikayesi, bir yandan romanının omurgasını oluştururken; bir yandan da geniş izlekten bakıldığında daha kuvvetli, zengin bir anlatı zeminini meydana getiriyor. Yoksa hikayenin günümüzdeki kısmı başka bir şekilde kurgulansaydı, Robbins'in kitabı tam da Amerikan tüketim kültürü içerisinde pragmatik açıdan işlevselleşecek bir eser olabilirdi.
Kurgu Robbins için her şey demek. Avrupa'da heykelimsi romanlar yazan 20.yy romancılarına göre Amerika her daim daha serseri yazarlar ve akımlar ortaya çıkarmıştır. İçlerinde kendimi en yakın hissettiğim çağdaş Amerikan yazar, kesinlikle Robbins. Optimist yaklaşımı, insanın beynini kanatmayan popüler kültür güzellemeleri/taşlamaları, Murakami'yi etkileyen(!) garip roman isimleri, masalsı alanları, zeki nükteleri, laf sokmaları, tarihi yeniden yazmaları, okuyucusuyla oyun oynaması gibi beni aktifleştiren, okurken daha çok zevk almamı sağlayan özellikleri var. Bir kere edepsiz bir yazar Robbins, en sevdiğim. Öyle yakası açılmamış sözler de söylüyor değil; daha Akdenizli bir doğallıkla seksten, aşktan bahsediyor. En çok bu özelliği hoşuma gidiyor.
Ama yoruldum da... Robbins'in üslubu ve çevirmenin hakimiyeti hakkında söylenebilecek olumsuz bir şey olduğunu düşünmüyorum. Beni yoran şey tamamen anlatının son bölümünün, başı kadar iyi düşünülmemiş olması olabilir. Kitap o kadar iyi başlıyor ki, ne kadar iyi bir kitap okuduğumuzu her satırda hissederek ilerleme fırsatını tanıyor bize. İkinci yarıdan itibaren ise bu his yavaşça değişmeye başlıyor. Ölümsüzlük ve koku ilişkisinde ilerleyen roman, özellikle Doktor Danny'nin dahil olduğu bölümden sonraları sürekli tekrara düşüyor. Belki okuyucunun kafasına kaka kaka onları ölümsüzlüğe inandırma amacını gütmüş olabilir yazar, bilemiyorum:) Bende biraz ters tepti.
Keçi en sevdiğim ikinci hayvandır bu arada:)
Herkese iyi okumalar.
8.5/10 -
"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being."
“Jitterbug Perfume” is a novel that starts out with 4 separate story lines. And then about 120 pages or so into the text the 4 stories slowly start to come together. As the tales become more and more entwined one cannot help but marvel at the genius of Tom Robbins.
The middle of the novel has moments that might get a little too heady for the casual reader, and therefore might come across as slow reading. Just plow through and make sure to pay attention. Robbins is setting something up for later in the text.
Par for the course with a Robbins text, his use of figurative language is astounding. Especially impressive in this book are some of his insanely creative similes. How does this man do it? On page 60 there is a metaphor about the air in Louisiana as an obscene phone call from nature. It is brilliant, you know immediately what he is saying, and it is typical Robbins. Also incredible in this book is the thematic use of beets as a metaphor that is so apt that when it is finally revealed you wonder at how you missed it.
The last chapter, called “The Bill” is simple, astounding, and very profound and a killer manner in which to end this novel.
In “Jitterbug Perfume” Tom Robbins use of the sense of smell to propel his theme is creative and so practical. It makes perfect sense. This is one of the best Robbins I have encountered so far, and it will guarantee that I continue the journey. -
I'm going to add many quotes from this book and not indulge too much in the plot.
Like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and my more recent read of Jonathan Carroll's The Land Of Laughs, this book took me into a maze of philosophies and literary genres, which one of the characters in the book, Dr. Wigs Dannyboy, so eloquently described: "As fortunate as I am to be born an Irishman and thus possess a license to broadcast this brand o' pseudolyrical bullshit, that's how fortunate I am...”
The striking beginning of the tale of Alobar, loosely --very loosely-- based on the multiple adventures of Homer's Ulyseus, had me sitting straight up, pen in hand, notebook wide open, heart beating, breath shortening. This book grabbed all my sense at the spin of the very first few words into the very first paragraphs:THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
The epigraph introduced the themes of the story:
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .The history of civilization is the story of man's emancipation from a lot that was harsh, brutish, and short. Every step of that upward climb to a sophisticated way of life has been paralleled by a corresponding advance in the art of perfumery. —ERIC MAPLE
Alobar would survive a thousand years and recount his adventures to the modern seekers of magical perfumes, botany and longetivity.
AND
The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms. —ERNEST BECKER
However, the moment he was devoid of the opportunity to exercise his own believes, the genes came calling:
Alobar, however, since, thanks to the Bandaloop, he had witnessed three hundred and eighty-five thousand, eight hundred and six sunrises in his life, and judging from the milky molluscan glow seeping through the barred window, was about to witness yet another.More awake, actually, for the guards dozed over their detective magazines, dreamily musing about the long Thanksgiving weekend that was approaching, while Alobar was kept fully conscious by the smell of his body aging. Yes, he could smell it. During the first year of his sentence, he hadn't aged a notch. His body was still running on the impetus of a millennium of immortalist practices.
The prose was just so picturesque and descriptive that it was hard for me not to add even more quotes from the book
With the exception of breathing techniques, he was unable to continue those practices in prison, however, and one day it dawned on his cellular bankers that the immunity accounts were overdrawn and there hadn't been a deposit in fifteen months. The DNA demanded an audit. It was learned that Alobar's figures were juggled. He had successfully embezzled more than nine hundred years.
Outraged, the DNA must have petitioned for compensation, because within a week, Alobar's salt-and-pepper hair had turned into a pillar of sodium. Wrinkle troops hit the beaches under his eyes, dug trenches, and immediately radioed for reinforcements. Someone was mixing cement in his joints.
Now, in his third year behind bars, he could smell, taste, and hear the accelerated aging going on inside him. It smelled like mothballs. It tasted like stale chip dip. It sounded like Lawrence Welk.THE CARROT SYMBOLIZES financial success; a promised, often illusory reward. A carrot is a wish, a lie, a dream. In that sense, it has something in common with perfume. A beet, however . . . a beet is proletarian, immediate, and, in a thoroughly unglamorous way, morbid. What is the message a beet bears to a perfumer? That his chic, elitist ways are doomed? That he might profit from a more natural, earthy, straightforward approach? This beet, this ember, this miner's bloodshot eye, this apple that an owl has pierced, is it a warning or friendly advice?
Postmodernism, magic realism, epic moments fill up this lengthy, too often dragging tale, bogged down by philosophical daydreaming and too much carnal moments for my taste, but the humor and the literary rhythms of the prose kept me reading.
Alobar's tale spanned several continents and nine centuries. It is the story of perfume, of consciousness, of historical moments, of life and beet!
This book was an ambitious undertaking that worked very well. It's not a book for everyone, but certainly leaves much to ponder in its wake. It was a slow read. But a very good one.
One of my favorite quotes from the book: Louisiana in September is like an obscene phone call from nature.
I truly loved the experience. And now for more beet in the diet and the Bandaloop dances. I'm all set to meet up with Aljobar in my next life :-)
Postscript in the book:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR TOM ROBBINS has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Portland Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962.
After reading this book, you will have to agree :-)) A friend recommended the book and curiosity got the better of me of course, but I'm glad I took it on. -
Ξυπνάς ένα κρύο χειμωνιάτικο πρωί, έχοντας δει ένα πολύ καλό όνειρο και μένεις τυλιγμένος στη ζεστασιά και τη θαλπωρή του παπλώματος ή της κουβέρτας, χωρίς να θέλεις να σηκωθείς από το κρεβάτι και χουζουρεύεις για όσο περισσότερο χρόνο γίνεται, εισπνέοντας παράλληλα μυρωδιές από ένα πλουσιοπάροχο πρωινό που ετοιμάζεται στην κουζίνα. Ε λοιπόν, κάπως έτσι θα περιέγραφα την εμπειρία της ανάγνωσης αυτού του βιβλίου. Θεσπέσιο.
-
The most glarin’ failure o’ the intelligentsia in modern times has been its inability to take comedy seriously.
The above Wiggs Dannyboy quote sums up the experience of my first Tom Robbins novel. It was a wild, irreverent, intellectually challenging and most of all a ‘fun’ ride, a ‘look up Chomolungma’s skirts’, a perennial search for ‘the perfect taco’, a quest for immortality and the meaning of life that tries to expose the connections between perfume, tantric sex, transcendental meditation, pagan rites and ballroom dancing ... oh! and beets.
Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun. Of our trees, the palm is the obvious stand-up comedian. Among fowl, the jester’s cap is worn by the duck. Of our fruits and vegetables, the tomato could play Falstaff, the banana a more slapstick role. As Hamlet – or Macbeth – the beet is cast.
The beet, or mangel-wurzel, gets the royal treatment in the novel, put on an equal footing with ancient deities and with esoteric fragrances, granted deep philosophical significance and mysterious metahysical powers. Robbins lets his exuberance fly from the very first page in singing a paean to the under-appreciated vegetable. The introduction also serves as a weeding out device for starched-collar or thin-skinned readers who might be easily offended by the satirical attacks on widely accepted atitudes and religions. Speaking for myself, the intro had the opposite effect of drawing me instantly into the story.
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finished with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The story / plot itself turned out to be almost irrelevant compared to the flow of ideas and the gleeful deconstruction of ‘serious’ literature. Priscilla the genius waitress is working in a Mexican food restaurant in Seattle and in her spare time she experiments with the ultimate perfume. Her mentor, Madame Devalier, is also working on a new perfume in New Orleans, with the help of an alluring assistant named V’lu and of a supplier named Bingo Pajama. Across the ocean, in the perfume capital of the world, Marcel ‘Bunny’ LeFever is experimenting himself with the olfactive revolution. Later in the book, the different strands meet again in Seattle at an institute researching longevity under a modern Flower Power guru named Wiggs Dannyboy and a German Nobel laureate named Wolfgang Morgenstern. If you think this was easy to follow, add an Argentinian accordionist, a secret Tibetan sect named the Bandaloop, a Saxon King named Alobar and an Indian low-caste woman named Kudra, mix in Albert Einstein and a scene borrowed from Dante’s Inferno, extend the plot to cover several centuries, include an impromptu history of perfume from the ancient to the modern times and put the cherry on the cake with the foul-smelling god of anarchy, drunkenness and promiscuity – PAN. Then you might have an idea of the epic scope of Tom Robbins’ novel.
According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an ‘alobar’ is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which ‘Old Spice’ after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes ‘Chanel No. 5’ to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.
Of this long list of characters, all of whom are relevant in the economy of the novel, the catalyst or core element is probably Alobar, whose timeline come first and who defines in the most simple words the eternal human dillema : sooner or later we all have to deal with the awareness of death. Alobar refuses to accept Death’s supremacy and inevitablity, setting out to find the secret of immortality:
I may be mad, but I prefer the shit of this world to whatever ambrosias the next might offer.
and,
Alobar, once king, once serf, now individual – have you heard of individuals? – free and hungry, at your service. My mission? Well, frankly, I am running away from death.
Heading East from his native Bohemia, Alobar learns that freedom of choice equates also with danger and hunger, and meets in Greece with one of the old wise ones - The Great God Pan – who adds another piece or two to the puzzle of existentialism and free will:
Come with me, Alobar, for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.
and,
The gods have a great sense of humor, don’t they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.
Refreshed by the god’s drink and by the lusty dryads hanging around Pan, Alobar continues to head East, reaching the roof of the world where at first he seeks refuge in a Buddhist monastery, only to discover that he very much prefers the material to the spiritual life. A young Indian woman helps him to make the decision, and from this point forward they will be a couple.
Here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. Now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas’ final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat; why, Kudra, it is surrender; craven, chickenhearted, dishonorable surrender.
By this point of the journey I have also became aware of a tendency towards preaching on the part of the author, but I enjoy so much his barbed style that he gets a free pass for more of the same:
If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation. I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.
Yay!!! for Alobar and Kudra ! Reader, be prepared for some steamy scenes of enjoying life under the majestic Chomolungma. Robbins continues to fire up his aphorism gun:
To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.
... making time for a sideswipe at those serious, gloomy, cynical high-brow authors, comparing them with Timolus, who judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day.
I would propose Robbins is deadly serious in his comedy, coming down hard on the side of Pan and decrying the ways first Christianity, and later Pure Reason (Descartes and his disciples, according to Alobar) have taught us that life is pain and suffering. In this plea, Robbins sounds to me like a later day hippie, a more articulate but equally passionate supporter of a life among flowers and unrestriced love.
The old god had endured severe setbacks in the past: the disdain of Apollo and his snooty followers, the rise of cities, the hostility of the philosophers – from Aristotle to Descartes – with their smug contentions that man was reasonable and nature defective, and, most damaging of all, the concentrated efforts of the Christian church to discredit his authority by identifying his as Satan. The arrogant attacks, the dirty tricks, the indifference had rendered him weak and invisible, and might have destroyed him altogether had not an unreasonable affection for him persisted in isolated places: hidden valleys and distant mountain huts; and in the hearts of heretics, lusty women, madmen, and poets.
The same theme of the fight between Pan and Apollo is picked up later by Priscilla and Wiggs Dannyboy in Seattle, as they discuss Flower Power and French existentialism:
- Seems to me that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial. Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important.
- Reality is subjective, and there’s an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important’ only if ‘tis sober and severe. Sure and still you’re right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they’re not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin’ on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
Practising what they preach, Priscilla and Wiggs follow in the footsteps of Alobar and Kudra, learning to find happiness in self-expression and getting in touch with their animal side.
Where does perfume come in, you might ask? Well, it’s complicated! and while it might have something to do with disguising the bad smell of Pan, the disappearance of dinosaurs or reaching directly into our subconscious part of our brains, I believe it is better to let the Parisian specialist, Bunny LeFever, explain.
Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals. Squeezed from the reproductive glands of plants and creatures, perfume is the smell of creation, a sign dramatically delivered to our senses of the Earth’s regenerative powers – a message of hope and a message of pleasure.
and,
I have spoken to you this afternoon of poetry and of sexual magic. Not too many years ago, the names of our perfumes bore testimony to such things. There was a popular scent called Tabu, there was Sorcery, My Sin, Vampire, Voodoo, Evening in Paris, Jungle Gardenia, Bandit, Shocking, Intimate, Love Potion, and l’Heure Bleue - The Blue Hour. Nowadays what do we find? Vanderbilt, Miss Dior, Lauren, and Armani, perfumes named after glorified tailors, names that evoke not the poetic, the erotic, the magic, but economic status, social snobbery, and the egomania of designers. Perfumes that confuse the essence of creation with the essence of money. How much sustenance can the soul receive from a scent entitled Bill Blass?
Tim Robbins is preaching to the choir in my case, and he is guilty from time to time of becoming too enamored of his debating skills, ignoring the need for pacing, character development and an actual plot, but I am real glad I discovered him through the pages of this novel, reminiscent to me of the more ‘serious’ offers of another favorite author: Christopher Moore in “Lamb” or “Sacre Bleu”. I plan to read more of Robbins’ books, and I hope they will be filled with the same extravaganza of satire and philosophy.
Here are the rest of the aphorisms that I salvaged from my mangel-wurzel journey:
If a person has an “active” life, if a person has goals, ideals, a cause to fight for, then that person is distracted, temporarily, from paying a whole lot of attention to the heavy scimitar that hangs by a mouse hair just above his or her head. We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it’s dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.
>><<>><<
It’s been a huge adventure, an exploration of possibility, the invention of a game and the play of the game – and not merely survival.
>><<>><<
So make your perfume, my friends. Make it well. Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.
>><<>><<
Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.
>><<>><<
Theese dance she make zee blood happy, zee bones happy. I don’t know how to explain eet, but theese dance she celebrate that we are not, you know, died already. (Effecto Partido, the Argentine accordion virtuoso)
>><<>><<
Live by the heart if you would live forever! -
Tom Robbins is, to me, like the band Rush (I know this seems like I'm trying too hard, but honestly, this is the best analogy I can come up with & this is legitmately the first thing that came to mind): You like them ok, and even get a bit excited when they come up on the radio, but when you're grabbing CDs for your car, your copy of "Moving Pictures" somehow never quite makes the cut. That's how it is with me and Tom Robbins. Well written? Check. Interesting characters? Check. Unique? Double check. Glad I read the book? Check...But somehow this is all never enough to get me to grab his next book off the shelf. Robbins is one of my wife's favorite authors, and I can see why, but somehow his work just doesn't grab me on a long-term basis. Still though - great book. If you want something a bit unique & haven't read his stuff yet, give this a try. Unlike me, you'll probably want more.
-
Talk about not understanding what all the fuss is about. If I'm not mistaken, Tom Robbins is kind of a literary legend in some circles, and at the very least has sold millions of books. And while there's certainly an intelligent, probing mind behind this sexual-philosophical hodgepodge of a book, the sum of the parts of my first foray into Robbins' world was not much fun to read.
I recently read an interview with Tom Robbins in which the author admits to being able to write about two pages a day. This makes sense to me because I was able to read about two pages of Jitterbug Perfume a day. I read this book out loud to my girlfriend, over many months, usually in bed before going to sleep. We thought it would be a fun book to read together, and at first it very much was, but by the end it was a struggle to get through even a few paragraphs without nodding off.
Robbins sets a colorful cast of characters in motion right from the get-go: There's Priscilla, a sexually frustrated "genius waitress" trying to invent perfume in her Seattle apartment. There's Madame Devalier and her assistant V'lu, who also make perfume in New Orleans, and there's yet a third perfume-making team out in Paris, whose names I can't remember so pointless were they to the story. (And yet, they are talked about as if they are important, a penchant Robbins seems to have for... nearly everything. Every sentence of Jitterbug Perfume rings with an air of unfathomable significance, as if Robbins has solved the mysteries of the universe and has taken it upon himself to explain it to us. It's all VERY self-important.)
Anywho! Not one of the aforementioned characters is very interesting, but it's intriguing to imagine how they all might connect. Also, Robbins kept us hooked (initially) with the tale of yet another set of characters, Alobar and Kudra, a couple who meets something like 900 years ago, then proceeds to learn ancient eastern self-preservation techniques and live healthily and happily until the present day. At first, it's fascinating to simply follow these strange, exotic characters around a bygone Eastern world, but Robbins can't sustain the momentum. When they actually start living forever, moving through time and geographical location, it feels like we are living forever right along with them. They have long, tedious conversations expounding on love and relationships and spirituality and immortality and other stuff I can't remember and they meet the god Pan, who makes everyone he encounters extremely turned on despite the fact he smells horrible.
I dunno... I'm getting tired even thinking about this book, let alone trying to describe hundreds of pages of arbitrary plot detritus that I've already spent months slogging through. Simply put, Robbins' pinballing wackiness and juxtaposition of the mythical and the real felt contrived to me, and his relentless stream of off-kilter metaphors and humorous asides felt a.) dated as hell comedy-wise (like the literary version of 1980s stand-up comics), and b.) extremely self-satisfied, as if he was constantly winking and nudging us and saying "can you believe I'm describing something this way? can you believe it? eh, sonny? pull my finger!"
This funny/dirty old man vibe achieves downright unpleasant proportions in the second half of the book, when the Priscilla character falls for a much older man/social theorist named Wiggs Dannyboy, who she bangs relentlessly in scene after scene of squirm-inducing sexual depiction (positions? thrust patterns? fluids? You name it, you got it.) These scenes feel all too much like some kind of fantasy the middle-aged Robbins (At the time of Jitterbug's inception, that is) is enacting on the page—and they're gross.
It would all be ok (gross sex, Robbins' arrogance, meandering plot threads) if it all went somewhere, but it doesn't. It really doesn't. The disparate characters do come together, but not in any meaningful fashion, and last-minute additions like Wiggs Dannyboy, Bingo Pajama and a strangely sentient swarm of bees feel tacked on, and boring in their arbitrariness. There are some nice ideas in Jitterbug Perfume—some pointed stuff about deep breathing, healthy eating, and general soulful living predates the alternative lifestyle movement by at least a decade or more—but lord you have to dig to find it. And dig, and dig, and dig... -
Two stars, and I’m being nice. And I am a f*cking huge fan of beetroot.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been eating it like it’s the only vegetable on the menu. It’s good for iron in the blood, and I like it pickled, raw and boiled. I could eat it constantly. I love sex as well, I love reading about it. Of course you want to know a lot about.
But this book was hysterical. In the beginning I was so enthusiastic, and Alobar had a face and body of Gerard in ‘300’ movie. Oh la la la, take me, take me, take me. Even if you don’t shower.
Book had it all, and then he/Robbins started talking. And I started blinking, what are you talking about? And it wasn’t the sex part, nymphs coming all over the grass, sperm all over everybody, lesbians gnawing in the toilet, Rabbit nose, and now I am here, now I am not, bees as an accessorize and religious history.
My thoughts were, aha, ok, yes, ok. Simple thoughts. I’m mocking this book too much now, but what I want to say. General idea is great, really fascinatingly great - people should enjoy more, appreciate life more, look what happened throughout history - we have every reason to understand happiness and love, to live happily and be in love (and to have as much sex as we can) and send positive vibes to each other.
The essence of everything is Pan ... but all together, this book was like warm milk. Something that I was forced to drink when I was younger and it tasted like shite, and in this metaphor, I was forcing myself to finish reading.
Cogito, ergo sum. Sorry Tom, thank you Descartes.
Final result: lets put that nose little bit down, ha, Mr. Robbins? Lets not tear the clouds with it. -
One thing I can say for sure is Jitterbug Perfume is nothing like anything I have read so far. This is my first Robbins so I don't know what his other novels are like, but we're talking about an exceptionally charismatic writer here.
Robbins takes a bunch of ingredients totally unrelated to one another and makes a story that's as unique as it is brilliant. Beets, horny gods, perfumes, ancient and modern history, eternal life, philosophy and sex. Not the cheesy, romantic kind of sex, but the raw, primitive and full of body fluids one. These are the basic ingredients that he uses to make a story both unforgettable and dreamy.
History-wise, Robbins has certainly done his homework. It seems like he knows what he talks about when it comes to ancient and medieval times. The icing on the cake was the masterful use of humor to communicate his rather heretic ideas about pretty much everything. And of course his depiction of the afterlife is simply genius.
To make a long story short, this is great stuff which I'll definitely be checking out more of. -
Τομ, Σ' ΑΓΑΠΩ!!! ΕΙΣΑΙ ΤΟ ΑΛΛΟ ΜΟΥ ΜΙΣΟ! Είσαι η μεγάλη μου αναγνωστική καψούρα!
-
i've found that with tom robbins' novels, you either love it or hate it. i hated this one. disappointing since so many people have told me that i "HAD" to read it, assured that i would just love it. for the record, i liked 'still life with woodpecker' and 'skinny legs and all.' i didn't care for 'even cowgirls get the blues' and thought this one was so full of shit that the topic of perfume was so sorely needed to cover the overwhelming stench. maybe i just wasn't in the right mindset. maybe i'm over his pompous prose and veiled quasi-misogynistic crap. maybe i just don't like old white guys writing southern black women in phonetics. oooh-ee, massa, tom robbins ain't no race-iss. tom robbins an ar-teest, mm-hmm. take a flying leap, jitterbug perfume. twilight was more entertaining than you.
(i'm going to get so much flack for this. i can feel it coming. but really, what the hell do i know? i'm just one dumb woman, right?) -
Tom Robbins in this book opened my eyes to the wild, wild world of modern satire, absurdity, light-hearted comparative religious blasphemy, and BEETS.
Just ignore the stench that just entered the room... it's only my old pal and buddy, PAN.
Drunken revelries are pushed aside for the enjoyment of tons of sex, hot baths, and more sex as the keys to immortality, but if you think that's just fine for a novel like this, THINK AGAIN. A genius waitress working in a Mexican restaurant in Washington State is working on a 1000-year-old mystery perfume while a 1000-year-old sacrificial king refuses to die, working as a janitor. Add a wild cast of Tibetan monks, a low-caste ancient woman, the coming floral revolution, and more sex than you can shake your stick at, and throw it into one hell of a funny satirical soup full of great lines and beets on your doorsteps.
This book changed my life the first time I read it, but I didn't exactly fall into a quest for the perfect taco... I went on a road trip to find the perfect pizza, tho, and while I only did the homeless wandering bit after college for a month, Alobar got to do it for a millennia! I'm so jealous! Oh, yeah, and he's easily had more sex than ANYONE in the world. And baths. Sigh.
Such a wild, irreverent ride. :) I read this and then I look at what Gaiman did later. I definitely thought of Robbins when I read American Gods. :) It's a bit funnier than American Gods, too. :) -
I avoided Tom Robbins novels for years particularly because my old boyfriend was such a fanatic about him and even when I was deep into him, we disagreed on most literature. The way he and his pretentious 20-something arty bros talked about Robbins put me off in a big way. Lately, I've been getting multiple nudges from friends who know I've been researching olfaction so I gave in and read JP for research.
My original instinct was correct: this is a novel for the all-male tribe I call "toilet philosophers" because most of the philosophy they read was while they were on the pot. Aside from its misogyny, the lamest thing about this novel is the spiritual message clumsily tacked onto the plot and heavily underscored in the last 40 pages.
I must admit that there are some admirable aspects about JP. It is well researched and I like the playful attitude towards myth, history, perfume and food. I found the narrative arc (minus the pseudo-spirituality) well crafted and interesting.
What I cannot stand is the novel's sloppy, infantile lewdness and its utterly misogynistic treatment of women. Each and every female character is about as deep as raindrop. In many ways, this novel is like a macho version of a Jackie Collins' novel where the plot gets in the way of all the more important sex scenes and blowjobs.
Don't get me wrong, I like sex scenes and Jackie Collins. The sex scenes in JP, however, are like watching a really drunk fatso try to get his groove on as if he were James Bond. The detail with which BJs are described makes these scenes like literary money shots, but in this porn, the women are gagging to be groped by slobs, crusty old lechers, handicapped, satyrs, and so on. It's truly painful. This book had so much semen on the pages, I felt I needed to wash my hands after each time I picked it up.
And in case you think that sexual subservience can be some sort of "modern, women-choose-to-please-on-their-knees feminism," it gets better. When the would-be heroine finally gets laid, her attempts to be sexy are mocked by the narrator's painstaking description of how shamefuly ugly and ill-fitting her clothes and underwear are. Lucky for her, the handsome one-eyed Irishman is a horndog and she's the only woman in the room. Except for the fat spinster, the female characters are all led by their vaginas despite their professional ambition. And that's what turns out to be the main joke of the novel: that women have professional ambition at all.
The "lesbian" character never gets the girl she's lusted after but settles instead for becoming her best pal. Sounds modern and empowering, right? Another female character is gruesomely stung by a bee on her perineum and luckily a creepy Frenchman is present to soothe her sting. barf.
Other problems are Robbins' really bad, self-indulgent puns, mixed metaphors and wrongheaded literary elbow nudges that seem designed to show the readers how well read he is since they add nothing to the plot. They are real groaners like "a populace that was puting Descartes before des horse."
Reading this novel made me so glad I left that Robbins'-lovin dude and his horny toilet philosophizing crew behind. Tom Robbins reminds me of other writers who combine vulgarity and humor (Vonnegut, Rabelais, Chaucer, Boris Vian, Alfred Jarry) but without their soul, intelligence, political engagement and verbal finesse. Read their work instead for hotter sex scenes, finer wit and more sophisticated style. -
This was … a trip. Simultaneously several road trips in parallel to one another and A TRIP. Maybe I’ve sniffed that perfume bottle one too many times.
We start in Seattle with meeting part-time waitress and amateur-perfumer Priscilla. Then, the focus shifts to New Orleans to a perfumer / shop owner (the stepmother of the aforementioned waitress) and her assistant before shifting once more, this time to a large perfume company in Paris. Yes, it’s all about the smell.
Like the godawful smell of Pan (see what I did there ;P).
But there is another level to the story, because in the 8th century, a powerful king successfully escapes regicide (it’s tradition in his kingdom to be killed off at the first signs of aging). He travels the world through the centuries, meeting a widow in India. Yes, there is a love story and some immortality there, too.
But what does all that have to do with a 300-year-old bottle with only a few drops left of the perfume it contained? And, most importantly, why are there beets everywhere?!
The author has a very peculiar writing style that not everyone will warm up to. At times, he’s almost cartoonish, some of the views on women (as seen in descriptions and comments) are definitely dated (the book is from 1984) but never too offensively so if you ask me.
Like I said before, it’s a trip. A trip through time, a trip to discovery (of several things), a trip through a world of astral planes and ancient deities.
And the author managed to incorporate quite a number of musings that may seem weird at first glance (like "Why would you even invest so much time into thinking about this?!" weird) but are actually spot-on and not as trivial on second glance. However, he does so in a very light way so you need to pay attention to notice it in the first place.
It’s certainly not the best story I’ve ever read (the middle plateaued for a while) but it’s solid and I enjoyed the flair of it as I’ve never encountered a story quite like this before - the weirdness and writing style made me chuckle often. In that regard it certainly also fit since it’s a story about Pan and that guy was seriously weird. Consequently, I did as the author intended: I simply enjoyed myself. I’ll still not warm up to beets however, and that’s final. -
“Bireyselliğimiz bizim tek varlığımızdır. Onu güvenlik uğruna ya da tüm toplumun çıkarları uğruna değiş tokuş etmeye, elden çıkarmaya razı olanlar bulunabilir. Ama onu koruyan, hayatın buruk yollarında onu hep yanında taşıyan, sevgide, düşüncede ona sadık kalan, sabah yıldızınca kutsanır.”
“İnsan sonsuzluğa kadar yaşayacaksa, kalbiyle yaşamalı”
"İnsan, yanağındaki ilahi renge, içindeki doğal pembeliğe sarılmalı; yoksa kahverengiye dönüşür."
Keşke hiç bitmeseydi. -
Δεν ήθελα να τελειώσει. Μοναδική η πολύχρωμη και παιχνιδιάρικη σκέψη του Τομ Ρόμπινς.
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I have vacillated between a four and five star rating on this. I LOVE the words. Each page was a delicious treat that kept me on the edge of my seat...what metaphor or simile or pun would Robbins pull out of the treasure chest that is his brain? I fell in LOVE with the language. I know it sounds weird, but the way he wrote about the beet and all vegetables on the very first page sold me. I knew this book would be amazing.
The only thing that keeps me from giving it 100% are the main story lines. They didn't flow as I hoped they would, or intertwine as simply as they were supposed to for me. I lost a little interest in Priscilla, I wasn't all that fascinated with Pan....the French Marcel didn't hold any special place in my heart....thus, the four star rating.
But READ it! Four stars from me is a GOOD, GOOD thing!
You'll never look at a beet the same way again!
HERE ARE SOME OF THE QUOTES I LIKED:
The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.
In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.
I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. -
Μια παλιά ουκρανική παροιμία λέει προειδοποιητικά «Ένα παραμύθι που αρχίζει με ένα παντζάρι θα τελειώσει με τον διάβολο»… Αυτό είναι ένα ρίσκο που πρέπει να πάρουμε…
Ο διακαής πόθος των ανθρώπων να νικήσουν τα γηρατειά και την φθορα του χρόνου αποτελεί την αφετηρία αυτού του παραμυθένιου αναγνωσματος. "Το άρωμα του Ονείρου" του Τομ Ρόμπινς δεν είναι ένα βιβλίο που απλά "διαβαζεται" αλλά ένα ταξίδι που διαπερνά όλες σου τις αισθήσεις, και ιδιαίτερα την όσφ��ηση! Το "άρωμά" του νοσταλγικό, σε παρασύρει στα αρχαία δάση της Βοημίας όπου ξεκινά μια περίτεχνη αναζήτηση της "αθανασίας" , του νοήματος της ζωής και της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης.
Πρόκειται για μια εκκεντρική ιστορία , γεμάτη μεταφορες και συμβολισμούς (οπως άλλωστε συνηθίζει ο συγγραφεας), ένα βιβλίο γεμάτο φιλοσοφία, όνειρα ,μυρωδιές και εικόνες! -
Tom Robbins'le tanışma kitabım oldu. Ben Tom Robbins'in kelimeleri ve şeyleri kendine özgü bir araya getiriş şeklini çok sevdim. İmgelem dünyası öyle kuvvetli ki; birbiriyle ilgisiz görünen şeyleri küçük birer çiçek buketi gibi bir araya getirip karşımıza çıkarıveriyor. Genellikle betimleme kısımlarını göz ucuyla hızlı hızlı okuyup geçen biri olarak, Parfümün Dansındaki betimlemeleri merakla, daha bi dikkatle takip ettim. Betimlemelerin yer aldığı her bir paragraf, kendi başına birer şiir gibi sanki.
İçerik de dil kadar ilgi çekiciydi benim için. Zamanında nihilist edebiyatı büyük bir sebatla okumuş olan ben; Parfümün Dansından sonra ölümsüzlük üzerine metinler okumaya başlayabilirim sanırım.
Ve; bu akşam yemekte tabii ki de pancar var. -
4.yıldızı Pınar'dan korktuğumdan verdim. Asli yorumu editle girerken anlatırım derdimi.
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If that cliche (is it a cliche? It's said a thousand times) were true about pictures being worth a thousand words...
This is a beet book. Robbins didn't BEAT us over the head with the beets. I was all over the beets like beets in borscht. (Hey, so were other goodreaders. Nice!)
What are words worth? William Wordsworth probably knows. I'm with Slugsworth. We try to steal Willy Wonka's chocolate recipes and the words from others. I'm gonna eavesdrop.
However, the horny goats were less experimental than a charm Aberforth Dumbledore would've performed one of his goats (too bad there probably aren't Harry Potter nerds reading this who fixated on that hardly mentioned weirdo side character as I did...).
The single most evocative visual and audio aid I could think of for this review.
However some stuff worked (the beets)... I didn't give a damn, in the end. I don't remember reaching the end. I didn't have the heart (beets are good for the heart!).
Robbins didn't make me believe that they should last forever. I didn't feel world weary from living so long because I didn't feel alive. For all the (hold on, don't speak French) joie de vivre, it was exhausting tries too hard playful. Just cut through all the crap, Mr. Robbins.
The past (particularly Keda's not wanting to burn on her husband's funeral pyre) retained a staleness that worked for me. I shouldn't say staleness... I want to say it felt like opening an old photo album that's dusty and smells dead. At least she felt like something that once was, even as she continued on.
Pan and the chick (I don't remember her name! Because she was dull)... You know what? I said all this in my American Gods review already. If their spirit wasn't enough on its own, their vampiric need for devotion from the masses wasn't gonna do it. For the sake of it? No way.
Pretty words aren't enough on their own. Beets are awesome though. I love it about history that food recipes makes me think about people long gone more than anything else. I'll think of how people thought to do that delicious thing in the first place (probably because they had to!). They should be like food. Deliciousness lasts. It came out of a real need, boredom, just because, culture, all good stuff (except for English food. What is wrong with English people? How can they put that in their mouth? You know, like what Bender says in The Breakfast Club when Molly Ringwald eats sushi?). A stream of pointless sex scenes about Pan and sirens and whatever aren't gonna say any of that like food can. And the food should be new! I don't want stale sandwiches. -
Following the resounding success of my
Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my
GIFTS AND GUILTY list.
Regardless of how many books are already queued patiently on my reading list, unexpected gifts and guilt-trips will always see unplanned additions muscling their way in at the front.
Let's jump straight in with a quote from somebody else's review:"I was surprised at how much I liked this book" -
Ditto,
Gertie
Gertie, ditto!
A couple of years back I decided to get all of my immediate family the same present (same-same, but different) - as many second hand books as I could get for £20. I averaged about 7 books each.
My brother got various Mann Booker Prize winners. My Mum got a platter of modern sci-fi and fantasy. My Step-Dad got a selection of humorous fantasy works: this being one of them.
He likes authors like
Tom Holt,
Robert Rankin and
Chris Moore. I wasn't familiar with
Tom Robbins (at all, like, zilch recognition) but it kept popping up on Amazon's 'if you like this, you might like...' so I took a punt and chucked it into his birthday bundle.
There were two books he came back to me raving about and thrust into my hands -
Lamb and
Jitterbug Perfume . Having read one
Moore beforehand, I knew what to expect from
Lamb, so I breezed through it in while stuck on a plane - and it's a good book. I didn't know what to expect from
Jitterbug , so I left it on a shelf... and it kept looking at me...
It's good! Not to put down their own work, but this is the kind of story that
Holt &
Rankin would kill to write! It's got just as much imagination and whimsy as their zany tales, but a much deeper and more finessed use of theme, and bucketloads more 'blood-on-the-walls' heart to it.
It's a story about immortality, perfume, passion and beets!
Quick tangent:
It's light hearted and smart, it's fun, funny, and tremendously enjoyable.
Robbins knows his way around a sentence and can certainly produce a playful paragraph - the man can write!
I particularly enjoyed Pan, the whale mask, the lesbian not-lover, heaven and the bees. A delightfully incongruous combination of words!
So why not a 5-star?
Because... It's just not quite my thing. It's a bit like watching Friends with the wife - there's no doubt it's entertaining, I don't complain about watching it - but I'd rather be watching Battlestar!
I doubt I'll ever feel the urge to re-read, and if there was a sequel I'm not sure I'd pick it up. We enjoyed our time together, but like a blind-date set-up that seems good in theory, it's clear the chemistry isn't right for a long term relationship.
After this I read:
Greywalker -
Hm. What to say about this guy . . . this is totally a guy you either love or hate, and yet I find myself strangely ambivalent. There are some things i really appreciated about the book and his style, and there are some things I really didn't care for. Whatever one says about this writer, the first is that he is a complete iconoclast of Rabelasian proportion. He ignores pretty much every rule that fiction writers generally, in good taste, abide by. And to an extent that's quite refreshing. He's incomparably clever at turning a phrase. His imagination is boundless. Through the first 50 or so pages I was very skeptical, but then he got me, and the reading went much quicker. I also have a lot of appreciation for his message, and that message is consistent with the manner in which he writes. I can therefore conclude that Tom Robins is simply writing who he is, and that's pretty much all one can ask of any author . . .
That being said, here come the complaints. I guess my biggest complaint was the fact that the novel's pull depended so much upon the author's cleverness. The characters all have roughly the same sense of humor (which I suspect is very much like Mr. Robins' own) and I felt they could have been interchanged with one another into different roles and it wouldn't have made a difference. And I guess that's it - I was so aware of the writer and his tongue in cheek (or tongue in ass?) wit that the characters remained at a distance from me, as if they were on a stage, and when the novel stalled (which was not often) I was painfully aware of this distance. At those points they seemed like characters from a Beckett or Pirandello play wandering about in search of direction. Robins is perhaps too overtly the master puppeteer with his many strings dangling from quick moving fingers . . .
The big question for me when I finished the novel was 'Why did I not connect on an emotional level with the characters?' The novel is wonderfully humorous, the author's aim is admirable, and he treats his characters with a decided tenderness; yet despite this I was left feeling a little aloof. And I think it was because of one thing: his characters don't change. They don't struggle. They struggle, but they don't seem to struggle as much with the reasons why they do things. They struggle with two things: bills and cosmic issues. In that order. I might have loved this novel ten or fifteen years ago.
Which leads me to my third and final criticism. This novel reminded me at times of Ayn Rand. Whom I despise. It also reminded me of BF Skinner, who wrote perhaps the worst novel (Walden II) in the history of novel writing. How can I compare someone like Tom Robins to Ayn Rand? How can I compare the leaping imagination of Tom Robins with the clinical sensibility of Skinner? Why they seem like total opposites! Ah but they are, in a way, the same. You see to Ayn Rand things like characters are always subservient to her greater (and stupid) purpose of telling all people to act like butt-holes, and then they will be better off. And though Tom Robins has quite the opposite message, his characters are still subservient to his ideas, and I tend to think that characters need a little more
elbow room than that. Characters are people too, after all.
I was going to give this book 3 stars, based on my enjoyment level, but then I realized you know what? I've never read a book like this before and it definitely got me to thinking. Thinking of the serious, head-scratching variety. I can't say I'm going to rush out and buy his oeuvres, but I will pick one up the next time I'm feeling guilty about loafing about or surfing too much. And for that? 4 stars for you Tom Robins!
