A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left. Fiction Fantasy Humor Magical Realism More Details.
Tom Robbins 36 books 5, followers. His novels are complex, often wild stories with strong social undercurrents, a satirical bent, and obscure details. Search review text. People have recommended him on the basis of comparisons to Douglas Adams , but Adams is, you know, funny. 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 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 And of course: Above Seattle, the many-buttocked sky continued to grind.
Imagine 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.
Mario the lone bookwolf. Do you smell that? Most ingenious alternative indie writing ever. 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. The animalistic origins are clearer, but higher human brains have added associations, memories, feelings, etc.
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. Author 2 books followers. 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. 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. 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.
D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Already have an account? Log in. Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Sign Up. Pub Date: Dec. Page Count: Publisher: Bantam. No Comments Yet. More by Tom Robbins. New York Times Bestseller. IndieBound Bestseller. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, Theory, History, Community. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Durham, N. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality.
Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume In his novel Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins presents a narrative that rivals the often fantastical tales told in myth. Using classical mythology as a foundation, and, in particular, providing a loose adaptation of The Odyssey by Homer, Robbins updates and modifies characters and concepts in an effort to reinforce the importance of the journey of life and the discovery of self.
Jitterbug Perfume is a story of epic proportions , spanning a time-frame of almost one thousand years. The protagonist, Alobar, is first encountered sometime in the eleventh century as a king in Bohemia. Alobar rebels against the custom of his tribe that condemns their ruler to death upon the appearance of his first grey hair. He escapes this premature and arbitrary demise, and much of the novel follows Alobar's adventures over the next ten centuries as he continues to avoid death.
On the way, he encounters Kudra, the love of his life, the god Pan, and, eventually, the other important, modern-day characters in the novel. Their stories all converge in the twentieth century in a series of chance meetings. These present-day encounters revolve around the search for the secret ingredient to the perfect perfume, and involve the presence of a vegetable, the beet.
The structure of Jitterbug Perfume contains many similarities to the structure of The Odyssey. In a manner reminiscent of Homer's opening entreaty to a Muse , Tom Robbins begins Jitterbug Perfume with a treatise on the beet.
While Homer calls on the Muse to help Jitterbug Perfume Tom Robbins. Access Full Guide Download Save. Featured Collections. Preface-Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Character Analysis. Important Quotes. Essay Topics. Overview In Jitterbug Perfume , published in , Tom Robbins combines realism with fantasy and comedy to tell his tale of intertwined lives across centuries.
Plot Summary The novel quickly introduces the main characters. Unlock this Study Guide!
0コメント