Stephen Gilberg (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deckardcanine) wrote2025-04-11 10:32 pm
deckardcanine) wrote2025-04-11 10:32 pm
Book Review: Jitterbug Perfume
Sorry, Tom Clancy fans, but I gave up on Red Storm Rising. After nearly 250 of about 750 pages, I noticed I was plagued not by boredom but by apathy. There's not-so-Cold War action, all right, but I forgot the sequence of events and why I should care about any particular character. No wonder it became a video game but never a movie.
For a replacement, I picked up my first book by the late Tom Robbins and the only one I'd heard of besides Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. It's also the only book ever recommended to me by a tour guide. I don't recall how much I'd told him about what I like to read, but it sounded pretty quirky.
There's a good deal of both world traveling and time jumping involved. The earliest setting is medieval Bohemia, where King Alobar sees fit to fake his death and wander in search of an answer to the problem of aging. He hooks up with an Indian widow, Kudra, who refused to go through with suttee. She's much younger, but that won't matter when they've both lived youthfully for centuries, thanks to a set of practices they picked up from a lamasery. (All the practices are doable, so why has no one in RL managed?)
As in most stories about the unaging, they settle in one place for only 20 years tops so nobody accuses them of witchcraft or tries to take them apart to see how they work. Despite frequently rehashed arguments, they remain devoted, loving companions. It would take an extraordinary event to separate them....
In case you wondered whether any Greek elements would turn up (since my recommender was Greek), Pan plays an important role. Having vastly declined in power since people stopped commonly believing in him, he becomes something of a friend to Alobar and Kudra. He's invisible now, but his persistent stench inspires them to invent a new perfume, which includes part of the secret to immortality. (The word "jitterbug" never appears in the text, but a different dance-related term does.) If you know the basics of Elizabethan English, you're apt to be annoyed at how much Pan and his nymphs butcher it every time they speak. I like to think Robbins was just trying to be funny there.
I would've been fine with the focus entirely on those three major characters. Alas, the many peeks at modern folk in New Orleans and Paris, mostly trying to duplicate that legendary perfume, don't interest me nearly as much. Priscilla is almost refreshingly ordinary. Her quasi-boyfriend, Wiggs, is enough of an oddball to connect her with Alobar. Marcel is too big a language snob even for me. V'lu talks in a way that strikes me as an example of how the '80s were politically incorrect. I don't feel like mentioning the rest.
The weirdness, tangentiality, sliding scale of life versus death, divine diminishment, and graphic sex all bring Neil Gaiman to mind. Fortunately, while I didn't follow everything, I never got the impression that Robbins was abandoning consistency or sense altogether. Nor does it feel overly depraved or unrelatable in humor like Superfolks. Its take on religion and human nature is unorthodox but thought-provoking and not very offensive, kinda like a subdued Snow Crash.
The best thing about Robbins is his way with narration. Language gets poetic and tickling if not intoxicating. That might be enough to get me interested in trying another work of his, preferably on a less adult level.
I might as well throw in a bonus review of what I read alternately and finished at the same time: The Language Lover's Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos. The 100 puzzles range from simple Pig Latin translation to admittedly super-challenging inferences for languages I'd never heard of. About a quarter of the time, I didn't even try before turning to the answer section, which is almost as long as the rest. For me, the main joy was in learning trivia, not least about conlangs. Made for a nice break from my other reading.
Next up is The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik. I'm going from a novel about living indefinitely to one where lots of people young.
For a replacement, I picked up my first book by the late Tom Robbins and the only one I'd heard of besides Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. It's also the only book ever recommended to me by a tour guide. I don't recall how much I'd told him about what I like to read, but it sounded pretty quirky.
There's a good deal of both world traveling and time jumping involved. The earliest setting is medieval Bohemia, where King Alobar sees fit to fake his death and wander in search of an answer to the problem of aging. He hooks up with an Indian widow, Kudra, who refused to go through with suttee. She's much younger, but that won't matter when they've both lived youthfully for centuries, thanks to a set of practices they picked up from a lamasery. (All the practices are doable, so why has no one in RL managed?)
As in most stories about the unaging, they settle in one place for only 20 years tops so nobody accuses them of witchcraft or tries to take them apart to see how they work. Despite frequently rehashed arguments, they remain devoted, loving companions. It would take an extraordinary event to separate them....
In case you wondered whether any Greek elements would turn up (since my recommender was Greek), Pan plays an important role. Having vastly declined in power since people stopped commonly believing in him, he becomes something of a friend to Alobar and Kudra. He's invisible now, but his persistent stench inspires them to invent a new perfume, which includes part of the secret to immortality. (The word "jitterbug" never appears in the text, but a different dance-related term does.) If you know the basics of Elizabethan English, you're apt to be annoyed at how much Pan and his nymphs butcher it every time they speak. I like to think Robbins was just trying to be funny there.
I would've been fine with the focus entirely on those three major characters. Alas, the many peeks at modern folk in New Orleans and Paris, mostly trying to duplicate that legendary perfume, don't interest me nearly as much. Priscilla is almost refreshingly ordinary. Her quasi-boyfriend, Wiggs, is enough of an oddball to connect her with Alobar. Marcel is too big a language snob even for me. V'lu talks in a way that strikes me as an example of how the '80s were politically incorrect. I don't feel like mentioning the rest.
The weirdness, tangentiality, sliding scale of life versus death, divine diminishment, and graphic sex all bring Neil Gaiman to mind. Fortunately, while I didn't follow everything, I never got the impression that Robbins was abandoning consistency or sense altogether. Nor does it feel overly depraved or unrelatable in humor like Superfolks. Its take on religion and human nature is unorthodox but thought-provoking and not very offensive, kinda like a subdued Snow Crash.
The best thing about Robbins is his way with narration. Language gets poetic and tickling if not intoxicating. That might be enough to get me interested in trying another work of his, preferably on a less adult level.
I might as well throw in a bonus review of what I read alternately and finished at the same time: The Language Lover's Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos. The 100 puzzles range from simple Pig Latin translation to admittedly super-challenging inferences for languages I'd never heard of. About a quarter of the time, I didn't even try before turning to the answer section, which is almost as long as the rest. For me, the main joy was in learning trivia, not least about conlangs. Made for a nice break from my other reading.
Next up is The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik. I'm going from a novel about living indefinitely to one where lots of people young.