Jitterbug Perfume

«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 απο λαχανικά, γεύσεις απο φρούτα, μυρωδιές απο την παγκόσμια ερωτική αίσθηση της οσφρητικής ικανότητας, ψευδαισθήσεις, αγάπη που εκφράζεται με απόλυτο μίσος, αλληγορίες απίστευτες, παρομοιώσεις πρωτάκουστ��ς, 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.

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:

n  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.

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 . . .n

The epigraph introduced the themes of the story:

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

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

Alobar would survive a thousand years and recount his adventures to the modern seekers of magical perfumes, botany and longetivity.

n  
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.n

However, the moment he was devoid of the opportunity to exercise his own believes, the genes came calling:

n  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.

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.n

The prose was just so picturesque and descriptive that it was hard for me not to add even more quotes from the book

n  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?n

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.

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.

"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.

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...

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.