Fucking terrible.

An immortality fable thoroughly leavened with pseudo-spiritual bullshit, goofball names (Bingo Pajama! Huxley Anne and Wiggs Dannyboy! V'lu Jackson! The Bandaloops!), nonsensical descriptions ('Above Seattle, the many-buttocked sky continued to grind', 'The shaman grinned like a weasel running errands for the moon'), a black character dat sho 'nuff be talkin' like dis, and a yucky, hairy, hornball lesbian - Careful, Priscilla - she's going to corner you and eat your pussy!

At one point, this actually happens.

Worth reading - now I know not to read anything else:

1. Written by Tom Robbins

2. Recommended to me by the person who told me I should read Tom Robbins.

Tom Robbins'le tanışma kitabım oldu. Ben Tom Robbins'in kelimeleri ve şeyleri kendine özgü bir araya getiriş şeklini çok sevdim. İmgelem dünyası öyle kuvvetli ki; birbiriyle ilgisiz görünen şeyleri küçük birer çiçek buketi gibi bir araya getirip karşımıza çıkarıveriyor. Genellikle betimleme kısımlarını göz ucuyla hızlı hızlı okuyup geçen biri olarak, Parfümün Dansındaki betimlemeleri merakla, daha bi dikkatle takip ettim. Betimlemelerin yer aldığı her bir paragraf, kendi başına birer şiir gibi sanki.

İçerik de dil kadar ilgi çekiciydi benim için. Zamanında nihilist edebiyatı büyük bir sebatla okumuş olan ben; Parfümün Dansından sonra ölümsüzlük üzerine metinler okumaya başlayabilirim sanırım.

Ve; bu akşam yemekte tabii ki de pancar var.

As with anything Robbins writes I find myself hard pressed to find a way to accurately describe his work. Or the plot, or the style or even the characters come to think of it. Perhaps this is why the descriptions on the back of his books are always so obtuse, more like pieces of a puzzle that can only be deciphered upon completion of the book so that we, the readers, armed with our literary decoder rings can go back over them and say "ah, yes so the main character really WAS a janitor the whole time". But I digress.

Jitterbug Perfume is dense, and while I enjoyed the book immensely it was by no means a light read. Coming across Robbins's prose is a printed equivalent of the tunnel in the original 1971 Willy Wonka film. It's a constant barrage of light, sound, taste, smell (and because this is an adult novel) sexual stimuli that, once it gets going, refuses to ever stop until the very end upon which we find ourselves spit out the other end not sure wither we're a little worse or better for the wear.

As for the plot? Oh, what can I say that all the fine folks above and below me haven't already tried and failed to say in their own words. In a literal sense the story is about a 2,000 year old janitor king and his missing bride. In a figurative one it is about the potential within the reader for immortality. And in between all this there are drunken Irish men who love little girls who have their brains bashed out, bees that seek out revenge against city officials with a singular force of will that would do Edmond Dantes proud and plenty of beets.

This is not a perfect novel, it does have some very deep flaws to it, namely the stilted and overly abrupt ending which both fits into the tone of the novel and completely destroys it's pacing. And yet despite this and many other flaws it remains a worth while read, if for no other reason than it is so completely different from anything else out there on the book shelf today.

4.yıldızı Pınar'dan korktuğumdan verdim. Asli yorumu editle girerken anlatırım derdimi.

Please note: I read and reviewed this book in 2007; that review is posted here. I have made minor alterations to fit into my current format. The book was a used copy I picked up at Goodwill, and as a result I was not under any obligation to anyone. My opinions and thoughts are my own.

Book Synopsis from Paperback Edition: A story beginning in the forests of ancient Bohemia and ending at nine o'clock tonight, Paris time. The hero is a janitor with a missing bottle which is embossed with the image of a goat-horned god and is said to contain the remaining drops of the secret essence of the universe.

Brief Overview of my Thoughts: Tom Robbins shows in "Jitterbug Perfume" that he is a master with words and not afraid to play with the English language. His similes and metaphors are always good for a laugh or gape of awe...

My Synopsis: This book tells the story of a perfume bottle, a man who started as king, became a peasant, then a wanderer, and finally an immortal. We learn of and follow his journeys, the decline and death of Pan, and various perfumers who are seeking the ultimate fragrance. And let's not forget the unwritten hero of the book - the glorious beet!

My Additional Thoughts: The book is full of twists and turns, mostly created by Robbins' creative use of the English language - he bends rules into all sorts of interesting shapes. If you are a fan of Robbins, a fan of epic stories, or even a fan of books that are a bit different, you will LOVE this one! Don't miss it!

Bazı kitaplar vardır, insanın karşısına tam da zamanında çıkar hani, sanırım bu kitap da öyle bir dönemde çıktı karşıma, gerek betimlemeler gerekse ucundan tuttuğu konular -ölüm, doğa, tanrı, insan, şehirleşme, bireyselleşme ve ölümsüzlük arayışı vb.-, bu konuları kasvetli bir dille değil de zaman zaman tebessüm ettiren, zaman zaman da aniden suratına çarpan bir şekilde anlatması kitabı birçok kitaptan bi tık öne çıkardı benim açımdan. Okuyun ve de okutun efen'im. Okumak istemeyenin kafasına vura vura da okutabilirsiniz

If that cliche (is it a cliche? It's said a thousand times) were true about pictures being worth a thousand words...



This is a beet book. Robbins didn't BEAT us over the head with the beets. I was all over the beets like beets in borscht. (Hey, so were other goodreaders. Nice!)

What are words worth? William Wordsworth probably knows. I'm with Slugsworth. We try to steal Willy Wonka's chocolate recipes and the words from others. I'm gonna eavesdrop.


However, the horny goats were less experimental than a charm Aberforth Dumbledore would've performed one of his goats (too bad there probably aren't Harry Potter nerds reading this who fixated on that hardly mentioned weirdo side character as I did...).

The single most evocative visual and audio aid I could think of for this review.

However some stuff worked (the beets)... I didn't give a damn, in the end. I don't remember reaching the end. I didn't have the heart (beets are good for the heart!).

Robbins didn't make me believe that they should last forever. I didn't feel world weary from living so long because I didn't feel alive. For all the (hold on, don't speak French) joie de vivre, it was exhausting tries too hard playful. Just cut through all the crap, Mr. Robbins.

The past (particularly Keda's not wanting to burn on her husband's funeral pyre) retained a staleness that worked for me. I shouldn't say staleness... I want to say it felt like opening an old photo album that's dusty and smells dead. At least she felt like something that once was, even as she continued on.

Pan and the chick (I don't remember her name! Because she was dull)... You know what? I said all this in my American Gods review already. If their spirit wasn't enough on its own, their vampiric need for devotion from the masses wasn't gonna do it. For the sake of it? No way.

Pretty words aren't enough on their own. Beets are awesome though. I love it about history that food recipes makes me think about people long gone more than anything else. I'll think of how people thought to do that delicious thing in the first place (probably because they had to!). They should be like food. Deliciousness lasts. It came out of a real need, boredom, just because, culture, all good stuff (except for English food. What is wrong with English people? How can they put that in their mouth? You know, like what Bender says in The Breakfast Club when Molly Ringwald eats sushi?). A stream of pointless sex scenes about Pan and sirens and whatever aren't gonna say any of that like food can. And the food should be new! I don't want stale sandwiches.

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.

Parfümün Dansı'da Pazartesi bitti ama ben daha yeni yorum yazabiliyorum. Şu sıra okumaya zor zaman buldum. :)

Parfümün Dansı'nı genel olarak beğendim, güçlü bir karakter tablosu var ve hikaye örgüsü de oldukça iyi hazırlanmış, işin içine yazarın hayat-ölüm gibi konular üzerine düşünceleri de girince kitap okuması çok zevkli bir edebiyat şölenine dönüşüyor. İlk yarıda bunu çok güçlü hissetsem de sona doğru o kadar zevk almadığımı da belirteyim ve en sondaki öte dünya ile ilgili bölümü de hiç sevmedim, bir de yazar cinsel ilişkilere sanki gereğinden fazla yer ayırmış gibiydi. Yazarın kendine özgü tarzını sevdim, kitaptaki bağlantılar oldukça hoşuma gitti, üzerine çalışılmış bir kitap olduğunu oldukça iyi gösteriyor. Okuduğunuza pişman olmayacağınız, güçlü bir kitap.

Daha fazlası için; http://yorumatolyesi.blogspot.com/201...

Erleichda!

Η πρώτη επαφή μου με τον Τομ Ρόμπινς και δηλωνω ενθουσιασμένη. Πάντα με ιντρίγκαραν οι τρελοί τίτλοι των περισσότερων βιβλίων του αλλά για κάποιο λόγο πίστευα ότι δεν θα μου άρεσε καθόλου η θεματολογία. Είμαι ευτυχής που έκανα τόσο μεγάλο λάθος! Η γραφή του Ρόμπινς, ανάλαφρη, ειρωνική, σοβαρή και λυρική ταυτόχρονα, σε ταξιδεύει σε απρόσμενα μονοπάτια όπου συναντάς αρχαίες θεότητες, βάναυσα έθιμα, αισθησιακά αρώματα, τελετουργικούς χορούς και ένα σκασμό... παντζάρια! Κάθε πλευρά της ανθρώπινης εμπειρίας μπαίνει στο παιχνίδι της αναζήτησης της αιωνιότητας παρασύροντας μαζί και τον αναγνώστη, ο οποίος θα βγει από την διαδικασία αυτή λίγο διαφορετικός -έτσι τουλάχιστον ένιωσα εγώ, λες και το άρωμα του ονείρου μου χάρισε μια στάλα από τη μαγική του δύναμη και με έκανε να δω τα πράγματα λίγο διαφορετικά.

Read this book. It will change your life, and it will stay with you. Keep at it...the beginning seems bizarre and takes a while to come together, but it does, and it's so worth it. This story has probably impacted me more than any book I've read in a long time.