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...
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.
What do You think about Jitterbug Perfume (2001)?
I was surprised at how much I liked this book... it's been a long time (we're talking over a decade) since I've read a Tom Robbins book and my expectations weren't terribly high for this one. I knew absolutely nothing about the story when I began reading, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that it was the type of story I usually enjoy. It includes a "skilled underdog" story (a young female perfumer), and an immortality story, which is often pretty fascinating, and includes kings, alternate dimensions, and all sorts of craziness, but presented in such a way that it isn't as, well, kooky, as some of Robbins work can be.Robbins is clearly a man who knows how to weave his wordage, which I usually appreciate, although in my opinion sometimes he delves a little too deeply into theorizing/explaining mode (especially noticeable towards then end when the story is wrapping up).Overall a pretty good book- fun, smart, and sweet. Memorability Factor 8/10
—Gertie
This book is RIDICULOUS! Its a huge, dense story in a small package. I thought I would speed right through it, but it is so dense that it has taken me nearly 3 weeks to get through it.I recommend this book highly. Its smart, thought-provoking, and over-the-top. I have never read anything like it before.The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that the incessant absurd metaphors that Robbins uses grow tiresome after the first few chapters. At first they seem clever, but then after the first 20 or so I started rolling my mental eyes each time he used another one.But really, that is the only fault I can find with this novel. It has everything else I could ask for. And as soon as I finished it, I had the urge to turn to the first page and start over again (which is always a sign of a good book). "Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."
—Tori
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!
—Garen
