Typical Tom Robbins. When I try to think of the book as a philosophical one or as something to learn from it falls short as dachshund’s legs. But when I just let myself enjoy and soak into the light-hearted atmosphere and the language the otherwise flat lines like the classic “It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes.” become smile-provoking if not deep.

Rocky Mountain News
By Jenny Shank, Special To The News
May 16, 2003

Tom Robbins answers the phone in his New York City hotel room with the deadpan greeting: "Intensive care."

When asked if the speaker is Tom Robbins, he replies, "You know, I haven't looked in the mirror yet. But I'm afraid that you've got the right party. I tell you, I am about one scalpel away from a frontal lobotomy, so take it easy on me. If you were to see me this morning, you would think I was just one enormous liver with two red eyeballs sticking out of it."

Robbins' modus operandi has always been to disarm readers with humor and outrageous metaphors, then engage them in discussions of life, philosophy and language. Judging by the throng of passionate followers who flock to his readings and snap up copies of his books, he is doing something right.

Robbins, who comes to Denver on Monday to promote his eighth novel, Villa Incognito, won't disappoint fans who have come to expect a wild ride from his books. The new novel, set in Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and the United States, concerns Tanuki, a lusty, sake-swilling animal from Japanese folklore, the women who love him, and a trio of Americans who went missing in action in Vietnam and instead of returning home, set up a jungle utopia that can be reached only via a dodgy high-wire crossing.

Exploration of ideas


Robbins is up to his old linguistic tricks in Villa Incognito, continuing on his joyful quest to put two words together in ways that they have never been put together before.

"The very best part of writing for me is to create situations in which language can happen," he says.

Robbins' characters and plots are often so outlandish that it can seem as though he conjured them from the ether, but when he explains the elements of Villa Incognito, it becomes clear that they are logical explorations of his ideas and experiences. To account for his interest in Tanuki, Robbins tells a story that stretches many decades.

"When I first moved to Seattle in 1962, I was right out of college, I had no money, and I found a little Japanese restaurant called Tenkatsu that served a substantial bowl of miso soup for 25 cents. So I took my lunches and my dinners there, and I could attend to my gastronomical and nutritional needs for 50 cents a day.

"And in the window of that restaurant was a statue of an animal up on his hind legs. I thought it was a bear, but it had this enormous scrotum, which I thought was rather odd. I assumed it was some kind of virility symbol or totem, but what was it doing in the window of a restaurant? I was too shy to ask about it. It became a familiar figure to me, but I didn't really know anything about it.

"So now we fast-forward to 1987, and my financial situation has changed, along with many other things, and I've purchased a condo down on the waterfront in Seattle. I was in Los Angeles shopping for furniture, and I went into a Japanese antique store and there was this figure."

Robbins bought the statue that reminded him of the one that stood in the Japanese restaurant.

"I was overcome with this wave of nostalgia for Tenkatsu, and how comforting that place was for me, and how it got me through those lean years."

Eventually, a guest at Robbins' house recognized the statue as Tanuki, from Japanese folklore.

"Tanuki is a kind of trickster figure," Robbins explains. "The primary trickster figure is Kitsune, the fox" - who also makes an appearance in the novel - "and Tanuki is sort of the Jerry Lewis to his Dean Martin. The fox is the straight man - which I suppose is taking things to the extreme to call a trickster a straight man. But Tanuki is not the powerful figure that the fox is. What he represents to me, at least, is the liberated state of elevated innocence. He's all appetite, but in the way that a baby is.

"If you have a baby in the house, it's like having a Zen master on call 24 hours a day, because they're so pure."

Vietnam twist

The other elements of Villa Incognito were also percolating in Robbins' subconscious for many years.

"The most important phrase in the vocabulary of any creative artist is 'What if?' and back when the MIAs were in the news, I began asking myself the question, 'What if there were MIAs that had chosen to stay missing?'

"What would their motives have been for deciding not to come back? What sort of lives would they be leading? And is it possible that both their motives and their lives might be vastly different from what most people would assume?

"And then in this mysterious, complex way that writing fiction evolves, I started folding the MIA story into the Tanuki story."

Robbins is a patient, painstaking writer, and when he is working on a novel he sets a goal of two pages a day.

"You try not to leave a sentence until you think it's as good as you can make it, which is not a way that I necessarily recommend to anyone else to write. It's probably a ridiculous way to write, but it works for me."

Robbins' technique also demands patience from his fans, who usually have to wait four or more years between his novels. This technique, however, is responsible for the characteristic jumbles of subconscious influences in Robbins' novels.

"I'm primarily an intuitive writer. Which is not to say I don't think about what I'm going to write. I think about it 24 hours a day, practically, when I'm actually involved, embedded in a book. But I learned long ago - I've been doing this, well, actually I've been writing since I was 5 years old, and I've been writing novels for 30 years - so I have learned to trust my intuition.

"And I try not to keep too much of the plot or too many of the ideas in my conscious mind. I like to leave them to marinate down in the green ooze at the bottom of my brainpan and kind of squeeze them out, little by little, like toothpaste from a tube."

Robbins says his novels are "very carefully plotted, but not in advance. I can't imagine doing that."

"I was on a panel in October with John Irving," Robbins says, "and he announced to the audience that he could never begin a book unless he knew exactly how it was going to end. And I was astonished by that. Someone - I think it was (V.S.) Naipaul - said that if you know what is going to happen in advance, then the book is dead before you write it."

Ego trips

At 66, Robbins seems to be a contented man, grateful for his admiring readers and the attendant commercial success of his books, with few complaints about his career. He does allow, however, that he has "mixed feelings" about book tours.

"I get a lot of love when I'm out on tour. I just actually flew in from Albuquerque, and I was touched and honored and surprised by how many people came. About 500 people showed up for my reading there, and I was surprised by how many of them said that my books had touched their lives, and in many cases had changed their lives. And I never set out to do that. . . . So it really is a treat for me to get out and meet readers, to see who's reading my books, to make sure it isn't totally the lunatic fringe.

"But at the same time it is enormously tiring, even when I'm not in New York and out drinking red wine half the night. By the time I get to Denver, I will have turned into Casper, the Friendly Ghost. I'll just be an empty, dead sheet with a smile painted on it.

"But I still look forward to coming to Denver. My last book sold more copies in Denver than in any other city in the United States. There are good readers in Denver and you have a wonderful bookstore in the Tattered Cover."

Two characters in Villa Incognito move to Boulder at the end of the book so that one of them can attend the Naropa Institute, "and also I was kind of giving a little nod to the Denver area because they've been so good to me," Robbins says.

Still another Colorado connection in the story has to do with a song that Robbins interweaves throughout the novel, written by one of the characters. Robbins originally began writing this song at the request of Colorado jam band supreme The String Cheese Incident, which asked him to give them some lyrics.

"At that time I had only three verses, and they weren't as polished as those that actually ended up in the book. And they told me that they didn't think there was enough there."

The longer version of the song Meet Me In Cognito might tempt SCI, as it abides by the first jam band commandment: Never end a song when you can continue it.

And the meandering, self-reveling music of a jam band would be the perfect accompaniment to Robbins' unrestrained and linguistically nubile prose.


URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn...

A good Robbins book, but didn't love it quite as much as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues or Still Life with Woodpecker. Definitely not the place to start for anyone who's not already familiar with his work, as I found it a little more manic and hard to follow than the others of his I've read. Robbins to me always feels like a ride in a speeding car where the inside has a million video screens and you're trying to follow everything on the screens and everything that blurs by the windows. There are a million pieces that sometimes fit together and sometimes don't, and that's ok - Robbins has a distinct voice and a distinct style, and that always endears him to me even in his weaker moments. Villa Incognito didn't feel quite as glued together and coherent as his other works, but there were still plenty of parts that make it worthwhile and enjoyable for Robbins fans.

Ένας τρελλός τρελλός Ρόμπινς...

He keeps writing and I keep reading. He doesn't let me down.

A Hilariously creative and engaging story. Definitely one of my favorites.

This is probably the worst Tom Robbins I've ever read. Which isn't to say that it isn't funny. It is. It is very funny, with lots of excellent lines and clever little observations. The problem is that the characterizations, even for parody, even for humor, are flat and contrived, the philosophy espoused is pedestrian, even for a college freshman (seriously, can't people just get over their realizations that Columbus didn't "discover" the Americas? Is it really so profound that you have been told a lie of fact even as you are being told a truth of consequences?), and the political commentary is so incensed that it lies down on the traintracks of talking head babble.

Tom Robbins is better than this. I found myself agreeing with all of his views and disagreeing with nearly all of the ways that he said things. Gone from this novel is the depth of characterization and the complexity of the absurdity of the situations. Here things mostly just happen, largely to characters that end up not mattering at all, almost entirely for reasons that are arbitrary. Coincidence is fine when it brings to a head a point or a revelation of character, but herein there is coincidence simply to move things forward (the greatest sin there is), and while a mystic refusal to answer questions can create a sense of deeper intellectual exploration, here it is simply a refusal to ask or answer the questions that could have been posed. As it is, these unanswered mysteries are simply just things that happen.

In honesty, it is a novel worth reading, if you like these kind of novels, because it is funny and because it is fun (I enjoyed it all of the way through). The problem is that it is empty where it is trying to be full, leaving the reader, in the end, feeling likewise.

if this is his best i shudder to think of the rest

I think I liked this one in pieces more than I liked the whole. It struck me as less bizarre than some Robbins work, but still strange enough. I particularly liked the myth sections. However, at some point it just felt like it got done without finishing going anywhere. It managed to wrap up well enough, but I wanted something more. I think that was the difference between being one of the good Robbins books and one of the great Robbins books.

His newest book (I think) takes place mostly in SE Asia (Laos and Thailand) and is centered around 3 former Vietnam POWs and the international opium ring they run. It is, however, written by Tom Robbins so there is plenty of sarcasm, beastiality, spiritual dialogue, biblical badmouthing, circuses and tanukis. As always he is fun to read, but this wasn’t as good as Skinny Legs and All. I did enjoy it though and would recommend it.
Good Quotes:

“Trees are a damn sight more useful than people, and everything in the world knows that except people.”
Maybe he had a point. Trees do generate oxygen; men just breathe it up, stink it up, and generally misuse it. Trees hold the soil in place; men are constantly displacing it. Trees provide shelter and protection to countless species; men threaten the existence of those species. When in sufficient number, trees regulate atmospheric temperatures; men endanger the planet by knocking those regulations askew. You can’t rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn’t it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it? And which has more dignity - the calmer spiritual presence – a tree or a typical Homo sapiens? Best of all, perhaps, what maple or cypress ever tried to sell you something you didn’t want?
tttttttt
“Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion, patriotism, economics, fashion. That sort of thing.”ttt

“…for curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.”tt

“Do only human beings have souls, or is that a narcissistic, chauvinistic piece of self-flattery? I mean, can’t we look at that great old teak tree over there or at this gulch, and see as much of the divine as in some ’ol anthropomorphic Sunday school boom daddy with imaginary long gray whiskers and a platinum bathrobe?”ttt

“…every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.”tttttt

“We only rise above mediocrity when there’s something at stake, and I mean something more consequential than money or reputation.”tt

“Ambiguities and contradictions, that’s what biblical guidance is made of.”
tttttttt
“In the life of an individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.”

„Pojď se mnou do Inkognita,
chvíli pobudem tam spolu.
za tu chvíli naše šaty,
naše masky spadnou dolů.“
Tom Robbins a jeho román o životě inkognito a svobodě a lásce, zalidněný různými podivnými postavičkami s ještě podivnějšími příběhy se opět trefil do mého čtenářského gusta. Mám velmi ráda autorovu hravost, jeho nápady a na druhou stranu i to, že se z každé jeho bláznivé knihy dozvím něco nového. Tentokrát se mu podařilo namíchat směs z japonských mýtů, budhismu, animismu, války ve Vietnamu, teorií o duši a cirkusového umění, drog a toho, že často mohou i pomáhat, a seznámit čtenáře blíže s tanukim, postavou z japonské mytologie.
„Koneckonců bychom si mohli jednoduše představit vtip; dlouhý vtip, který se vypráví pořád dokola s tak silným a tak cizím přízvukem, že ho nikdo nikdy úplně nepochopí. Ten vtip, to je, přátelé, život. Duše je pointa.“

By standard book standards, I would say that this is a four-star book, easily.
But by Tom Robbins' standards, and he has set the bar for himself rather high I must say, this is just a mediocre three-star book.

It starts off brilliantly and as someone living in Japan who not only runs into pictures of Tanuki, sees them quite often scampering across the highway when driving but also has a statue of one right out front my door, this was right up my alley and something which immediately piqued my interest.

Then, in typical Tom Robbins' style he introduces another story, seemingly unrelated at first glance, but of course you know he is going to weave them both together strand by strand.

While he does this to marvellous effect in other books like Perfume Jitterbug (fantastic) and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (brilliantly hilarious), there is something about this narrative that just doesn't quite gel. Don't get me wrong, there are moments of brilliance and very witty comments but to my mind, and I might get sledged by serious Robbins' fans for saying this but.....this reads like a very promising FIRST DRAFT of a novel. It is very unpolished by his standards. If only he had done a little more work on it, it could have been great.

Secondly, the story ends so abruptly. I felt like he was really building up the plot to take it somewhere special but the ending was rather anticlimactic I must say, in addition to my added frustration of arriving at the last page only to find that someone had torn it out! Yep, that's right. Went to the nearest English bookshop in Tokyo where I could find a copy and read the last page properly in peace. Someone messing with my 'wa' again, no doubt.

I would still say this is worth reading but if you are new to Tom Robbins, definitely do not start here. Start with one of his greater earlier efforts.
A big thank-you, nevertheless, to Larry for lending me his copy. Larry, no more tearing out of last pages of novels please!