I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again Tom Robbins is human garbage

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Current mood: disappointed

"Could you pull off there? " she immediately asked, pointing ... to a gas station. "I really have to use the bathroom."

"Say toilet, would you darling. I don't believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides."

"Whatever."

"No, it's not unimportant. Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support it can get."

above is my favorite part of this book, which i would NOT recommend to others.

not being a huge reader of robbins, i did like skinny legs, found this and decided to give it a try. about 3/4 of the way through i found myself not caring about this pompous, arrogant man who i found to be a walking contradiction, too proud or blind to see it himself. but, i did want to see the book through, since i had given it a good 3 weeks of my life. the ending, in my opinion was open, left to interpretation. i did NOT put this book down feeling satisified!

I cannot describe how fun and how serious this book was at the same time.

As in the best of his earlier novels -- Another Roadside Attraction, Skinny Legs and All, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, and Jitterbug Perfume -- here again Robbins does a remarkable job of pulling in esoteric historical, religious, and anthropological information, to add an aura of magic to present-day events, without being tedious or heavy-handed or preachy. You might well laugh out loud at how he mocks and at the same time throws new light on our favorite beliefs and icons.

This time the zaniness is more controlled, the main characters are all human (unlike in Skinny Legs in which inanimate objects like a bean can and a dessert spoon walked and talked and provided insight into the thousands of years of human history that they had witnessed), and the action all takes place in the present day (with none of the jumping back and forth from ancient times to now, as in Jitterbug Perfume). The result is probably his best novel to date.

Typically, the main characters of Robbins novels are totally off the wall, and only by a tour de force does he get us to believe them and sympathize with them and suspend our disbelief probably further than we have for any other author. Switters, the hero of Fierce Invalids, is far more human and believable. He feels quirky in an Allie McBeal sort of way, where his bizarre reactions and motivations seem to fit together and make him endearingly human, and his illogic is just logical enough to intrigue.

Yes, Switters, the hero, a CIA operative, goes on a personal detour in Peru to return his grandmother's elderly parrot to the wilds of the Amazon. Yes, he chances upon a shaman whose head has the same shape as the parrot's unique cage -- like an Egyptian pyramid -- and whose innovative philosophy of life happens to closely resemble the parrot's one line "People of zee wurl, relax." Yes, Switters takes to a wheel chair for fear that due to the shaman's curse he will die if his feet ever touch the ground again. But the author goes out of his way to explain such outlandish circumstances, and presents everything in such a light-hearted humorous way, and strings so many impossible pieces of plot together with even more impossible coincidences, that you just enjoy the tale -- as you would Tom Jones or Cat's Cradle -- and find yourself amazed at how he then makes a religion out of humor of this kind, and actually throws light on human nature and destiny and the nature of religion.

Along the way, we get the gospel according to Robbins: laughter is holy, and opposites (yin and yang, male and female, dark and light, good and evil, God and the Devil) are in some sense interdependent and both necessary like the ones and zeroes of binary math.

Coincidence normally is a sign of novelistic artifice. Realistic authors either avoid coincidences, or build a story around one major coincidence. Humorous and ironic authors -- like Fielding and Dickens -- multiply coincidences and call attention to them, reminding us as we are reading that this is in fact fiction.
In Tom Robbins, as in some of the best of Vonnegut and Pynchon, in Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern are Dead, and even in that magnificent scientific/mathematical meditation Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter, coincidence is presented as evidence of artifice, but not human artifice -- rather the doing of some incomprehensible divine or natural plan or destiny. Yes, on the one hand, randomness reigns. The world is a meaningless and absurd place, and as in Lem's strange stories, man keeps coming up with the darndest ways of trying to manufacture meaning out of nothing. But on the other hand, it's not randomness and meaninglessness that's scary, but rather order -- an order that is immense and intricate and seems to come out of nowhere, and is beyond human control or understanding. Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern are shocked that in defiance of the laws of statistics every time they flip a coin it comes out the same. And here the minor coincidences (Switters, our would-be invalid CIA operative winds up in a nunnery in Syria, where the abbess is the same woman who years before posed for a nude painting by Matisse that now hangs in the home of Switter's grandmother in Seattle) and the major ones (linking the third prophecy of Fatima to a shaman in the Amazon) come together with such remarkable facility that we begin to see them not as the author's artifice, but rather as some bizarre kind of evidence that this wacky, random world we live in is governed by rules as yet unknown and perhaps unknowable, and that this seemingly arbitrary story grew in the author's inspired imagination with the necessity and precision of a crystal growing; that in some sense this novel reflects hidden or neglected aspects of reality. That such a contrived and impossible tale should feel so natural and fit together so well is indeed a minor miracle, as if with all his fun and foolishness Robbins has managed to tap into the energy and wisdom that somehow resides in language itself.

Za príbeh dávam tri mdlé hviezdy ale s dodatkom že Robbinsove metafory majú v sebe viac života ako väčšina mojich kolegov.

I'm sure Mr. Robbins believes this novel is brilliant. In quieter moments, while staring into the bathroom mirror, I'm sure he must consider his allusions to Nabokov and Joyce as evidence of his great company of writers. Here's the thing though, while reading this novel, admittedly my first by this author, I couldn't shake the sinking feeling that I was reading a lot of self-congratulatory crap from a man who thinks he is smarter than he actually is and who has such a dedicated base of readers that he doesn't even have to try... or edit. I can forgive a novel for being loquacious, wandering, unfortunately conceived, and self-absorbed. I loved My Struggle, after all. I can't forgive a book that is all of these things and yet has no ideas to offer.

This book is like adult contemporary music, clearly popular but not for me.

Likely my favorite book of all time. Former CIA agent Switters treks through the Amazon searching for shaman named "The End of Time/ Today IS Tomorrow," accompanied only by his parrot who lives by the motto "Peeple of zee wurl, relax!" I spit every time I hear the name "John Foster Dulles." Ingenious.

Pervy and annoying.

4.5 STARS

Wow. What a ride. This guy Switters is something else. So intellectual yet such a guy with an enormous appetite for libation and libido. Read it. You'll love it.

Another exciting and enjoyable tale by Tom. His last novel on my list, and I suspect I'll start re-reading them all again pretty soon.

With all the narrative and grammatical spectacle, comic mystical conflations, and James Bond-meets-Indiana Jones fireworks of a Da Vince Code plot that traverses the globe, it might be a strange first observations but I couldn't get the thought out of my head throughout this overwrought mess-

The landing of a good joke relies completely on the favorable demeanor and goodwill of the audience.

This is a book filled with puns and witticisms that rely too heavily on the reader being in a sort of pot-smoke stupor throughout. Robbins leans into ritalin-induced lists and alliterative tirades that become tiresomely familiar to spending too much time in a car with a dirty-minded middle school boy. He is constantly weaving together crass jokes and pseudo-spiritualist philosophies without much underpinning the ideas beyond style. Whereas Vonnegut turns each novel into one clearly defined sarcastic joke filled with goodwill toward most, Robbins is in his own world, trying to draw a picture on puzzle pieces he hasn't even connected to one another yet.

Switters is a CIA errand boy with a penchant for languages and borderline pedophilia. His interests in women tend to come with puberty and peter out around the time they come to legal age. After an oddball errand run in the Amazonian rainforest, he ends up with a drug-induced spiritual enlightenment which is never really explained in any way and a taboo curse that if his feet every touch the earth again, he will drop dead. Raised to despise monotheism as much as consumer culture and advertising by a highly intelligent and elitist materialist grandmother, he seems to be a reluctant spiritualist who is just open minded enough to admit that his intelligence warrants there is plenty he doesn't already know. That being said, any time anything gets beyond him (or Tom Robbins), it is wrapped up in a sort of nebulous nirvana, yin-yang, all is one confusion which suddenly falls blissfully beyond the nature of language.

Where were we? Oh yes! Fallen desperately out of favor on all fronts and stuck in a wheelchair for fear that this curse might be real, Switters somehow finds himself in a convent in the Syrian desert, accidentally cloistered among the most open-minded, feminist, loosely Christian order of nuns the world has ever seen. The common bond here is a secret prophecy the vatican has been trying to conceal and a demand that the world be offered spiritually-sanctioned birth control. From here, Switters spends the rest of the book trying to protect these nuns while seeing a confluence of all the spiritual elements from the Amazon taboo, the ancient Hermeticism of Egypt, the secret prophecy from the Virgin Mother, and his own personal insights and experiences. Oh yeah, and he finds himself having feelings for women his own age. An improvement, perhaps, even if they are all recently excommunicated nuns.

Style, style, style, for Tom Robbins style is the only virtue. At one most telling stage in the story, Robbins goes off on a tirade to list all the cool and fun things (rock n roll music, blue jeans, alcohol, etc.) that Satan gets to keep forever and all the lame things (pipe organs, polyester suits, church basement Bible studies, etc.) that God gets to keep when all is said and done. He jokes about how in the end, God should trade Satan and explain that he is done with structure and wants to go for style now. It seems that Robbins is only looking for spectacle and style, to the exclusion of things like hope, meaning, beauty, and strangely enough, pleasure. Sure, his characters smoke hash and have sex with strangers, but never does it occur to any of them to wonder whether any of their so-called thoughtfulness leads them anywhere or whether their so-called enjoyments bring them any sort of lasting benefit.

Perhaps the most frustrating elements in Robbins narrative come with his rants that retain so little reasonable or factual precedent. Like so many others before and after, he has no trouble throwing out all religious zeal as being a tool by which the powerful manipulate the people whom he is smarter than. Religion is the only opiate to which he cannot endorse for the masses. Monotheism in particular stands out as a most onerous and odious theory which can only be used to oppressive ends. In a strikingly faulty reflection, he mentions how the Apostle Paul suffers an epileptic fit on the road to Damascus, chalks it up to the presence of God, and begins a religion from that experience with which he sets about the systemic oppression of women. Even a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology, Roman culture, or Rabbinical standards at the time will lead anyone to conclude that Jesus (and the early church Paul helped to direct) gave women a much higher position in society than anyone in that part of the world found credible at that time in history. Tom Robbins' nuns are somehow enlightened enough to stand up for themselves before the Pope without questioning how the Catholic churches supposed attitude toward them compares to Jesus attitude toward the women who followed him. But Tom Robbins admits that his version of the Catholic church is most similar to the CIA or the Mafia.

What's the underlying missing ingredient? Virtue. Virtue is a concept completely lost on Tom Robbins, to the degree that I doubt he would be able to conceptualize the term. There is a deeply buried cardboard morality of sorts in his work (his characters seem to care about the general well-being of the human race when there is an elite group controlling it and the concern does not closely affecting their immediate personal satisfactions) but he does not understand Virtue as someone like Aristotle might conceive of it. Virtue as in the idea that all men can take steps toward a better version of themselves today without having to know the future. Virtue as in a capacity to better flourish uniquely as an individual by adhering to principles that can be universally applied.

Style, style, style. The aesthetic philosopher John Ruskin said that one's morality and one's preferred style were really one and the same thing. An alcoholic can be applauded for refraining from drink, but he is truly on a road to recovering something of himself when he comes to naturally desire something else more than a fifth. Likewise, there is no greater mirror for the individual or a whole society than to look at the things one has acquired a preference for. Robbins is all about style and therefore this novel is both a grand testament for how true this is an a sad exploration among funhouse mirrors. It makes one heartsick to think that someone could come to prefer this.

In the end, the wild tour of this story is about as fun as listening to gross stories from teens graffitiing on a dumpster behind the 7-11. Your tour guide is Willy Wonka, drunk and off his meds, and no one is laughing with him in the end.