Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
Written: Mar 21 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Colorful easy read combined with complex rich imaginative plot!
Cons: Unnecessary snide comments toward Christianity were like pee in pool.
The Bottom Line: A lovely tale, a very original easy read that you will definitely find very different from anything else you've read!
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| snpmurray's Full Review: Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume |
Jitterbug Perfume is the book that I tell friends to read when they indicate to me that they are interested in something a little different, a book off the beaten track, something that is going to take them on an unexpected journey. While Jitterbug Perfume is very easy to read, it is not so easy to write up, so forgive me if I am a hair more digressional than usual.
The problem in reviewing this book is the complex nature of the plot. Everything intertwines, and it is more difficult than the average book to determine where to leave off on giving you any more details. I’ll just do my best and not worry about it, eh?
Here is the bare outline….this book is mainly a love story. It is a love story that begins with the birth, in the dark ages, of a man who learns the secret of indefinite longevity without aging. Some centuries later he meets a woman with whom he falls in love, and they begin to travel down through the ages together. Being virtually immortal, and getting quite high in a spiritual way they, make some rather powerful friends on the way. Arguably their most powerful friend is Pan, the pagan god of the shepherds, lusty musty animus of the plains. Pan recognizes them as fellow travelers down through time and hangs out with them. An unfortunate series of events leads to the two lovers becoming separated in renaissance France, when Kudra (the femme) learns the secret to transmutation and leaves the earth plane, whilst her beau Alobar doesn’t quite get the trick of it. He is now stuck without her.
Time passes. Pan is weakening terribly, as belief in him wanes to nearly nothing. Alobar is likewise weakening as without his woman he is not even half the man he was before. They realize between them that the only thing that can salvage them both is the resurrection of a lost perfume, since it was both Kudra’s favorite and will bring her back, and is essential to Pans way of life.
Alas, Alobar does not know how to make the perfume. Pan is not permitted to be so linear as to tell anyone how to make it, and has to resort to subtle hinting, symbolic representation and spiritual punning. This is where the other set of main characters come in (in a plot-like sense, not chronologically.)
We simultaneously in the book follow the lives of three perfumers. Two are professionals in the trade; a high-flier in the Paris parfumiers, a New Orleans Creole and a third is a dedicated amateur, working to live (as opposed to living to work) as a waitress to fuel and fund her passion for making perfumes. These three are all troubled by the appearance in their lives of the recurring theme of beetroot.
Beetroot?
Beetroot and the required perfume are inextricably linked. Actually, everything I have mentioned is inextricably linked. That’s the nature of this book. Pan has somehow to bring about inspiration in the artists to make the perfume he requires. Alobar and Pan both have to survive long enough for it to help them. Meantime Alobar is pursued by the worlds more astute aspirants toward immortality who he doggedly tries to avoid. Life is so complicated for the infinitely prolonged.
So much for the plot.
Now, I generally try to give a good outline of the plot of a book, so you will have a good feel for what you are getting yourself into. I can say for just this once, confidently, that the above is not a representation of the plot of the book. The book is too convoluted for that. That’s actually one of the pleasures of it.
What I have really tried to do above is give you enough of the general outline of things for you to determine whether this is your kind of thing or not.
I am aware, having given this book to a fair number of people to read, that the response tends generally to be all or nothing. People either tell me they think that Tom Robbins is the best thing since sliced toast or they tell me that they think he is a jumped up idiot and that this book stinks.
This writer's style is contemporary beatnik. He drops a lot of contemporary references into his writing... "tootsie roll toes" springs to mind for example. It is a bit cutsie at times, and can come off a bit fake and unnecessary, like he is trying too hard to be looking like he is not trying at all. This is probably why people don't dig it. Did you like the way I used dig it in that sentence to look cool? If you didn't, you probably won't like Robbins for the same reason. You're so unhip it's amazing your hips don't drop off. Dude. Or something like that.
One thing that is unanimously agreed upon is that this book is far out. Really exceptionally far out. Like, way out there.
The characters in this book are truly exotic. There is an ensemble cast of bizarros. They are all drawn large and colorful, there are few peripheral characters, for even those that appear for short periods must justly be described as ephemeral not peripheral since whilst on stage they loom large as life in their time. An example of one of the smaller characters is a seeker after immortality, modeled it seems in equal parts on Timothy Leary, Rupert Sheldrake and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun.
Likewise the happenstance of the book. The players do not just live, they dance. No accident perhaps that Pan is so central to the book, as life’s dance macabre is certainly a central theme. Immortality, love, passion, and linking all, smell. Plot events drawn with thick colorful crayons rather than fine graphite etchings.
Forgive me if I wax lyrical in order to get the gist across to you here, it seems inappropriate to dissect this book too much. I don’t really want to get too objective, but if you are strictly left brained here are a few points….this is a very easy flowing read. This book is hard to put down, because the twists and intersectings of the plots, and the interest level of the events will keep you reading. This book is both eclectic and irreverent. The subject matter tends to the side of the esoteric, but the humor is tongue in cheek intelligentsia.
Tom Robbins has a bit of a problem with Christianity I observe, yet more irreverence there, but definitely with an edge of that immature urge to cast slovenly disrespect when none was required. The effect on the writing is akin to that experienced when a teenager swears in order to try and give their speech a sense of maturity. You should note lest you suspect my own prejudices in this appraisal that I am not a Christian. I have a bias; not toward Christianity, but away from disrespect.
Recommended:
Yes
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snpmurray
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