dnf'd at page 68 after someone was described as "a pig for pussy"

I liked this more than I thought I would have but less than I think I should have. Review to follow, maybe, someday, but in the meantime, here are some of my notes about which I will feel compelled to expound upon at the proper moment in the future:

I. Analogy that Marx Marvelous' intentions for Amanda would be like Trix Rabbit trying to get the Lucky Charms.
II. The taste of Amanda's twat
A. Plucky Purcell - North Carolina BBQ
B. John Paul Zeller - Sushi
C. Nearly Normal Jimmy - Wilderness
D. Marx Marvelous - Lucky Charms
III. Reads like an introductory philosophy class. Bursts of brilliance and interesting thoughts followed by three hours of class lecture that threatens to entice any typical philosophy student to change majors.
IV. Mon Cul the baboon. Ha! My ass!
V. Infinite Goof; the pursuit of meaningless meaning. DFW inspiration?
VI. The ending for almost everybody was awesome. And then there was that last friggin' paragraph; the one about the pine cones. I don't even know what to say about that. I need to think about it for awhile...

Robbins resists convention in this improbable story told through the multiple voices and expository styles of his characters. He opens in the present with a straight-forward description of events. The narrator is a fictional writer oscillating between third person objectivity and the confiding first person plural of “we.” The narrative shifts between past and present scenes, interspersed with biographical notes, journal excerpts, reconstructed conversations, unspoken thoughts, emotions of the characters, and even the occasional editorial. The first two sections introduce Amanda and her future husband John Paul Ziller. Theirs is a yin-yang coupling. Ziller was born in the Congo. Attired like an atavistic Tarzan and embellished with a bone through his septum and a giraffe skin headband, he caught the imagination of the avant-garde art world. His celebrity was undiminished by claims that his tour de force, the “Non-Vibrating Astrological Dodo Dome Spectacular,” was fashioned by his pet baboon Mon Cul (go ahead, look up the meaning: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/french-en...)! Ziller's natural voice is through music — flute and drum — his journal entries being incomprehensible. One of his few lucid utterances was the declaration: “I'm always voyaging back to the source.” (p.50) As for Amanda, she might best be characterized as a sensuous earth mother, a free-spirited forager of mushrooms and spiritual insight. From her meditations on the butterfly and what she calls “The Infinite Goof” she has reconstructed a novel interpretation of reality hinted at in astonishing aphorisms. When the family lawyer chides her for fraternizing with weirdos, she counters: “There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding.” (p.10) Contemplating Ziller's drumming, Amanda concludes: “The drummer deals almost exclusively with rhythm, therefore he is an architect of energy. Art is not eternal. Only energy is eternal. The drum is to infinity what the butterfly is to zero.” p.106
As a unit they are unwitting assailants on the bedrock of society: Authority. They form an unlikely pair. Amanda is a vegetarian; Ziller, a carnivore, is enamored with the symbolic potency of the sausage. They elect to serve only hot dogs and juice at their roadside cafe and Ziller erects a 30 foot long hotdog which can be spotted from a mile off. “...it is three-dimensional, tactile, larger than life, as rotund and good-natured as Falstaff but not entirely devoid of Hamlet's rank” (p.72) the narrator intones. As for the rest of the attraction, it consists of a flea circus, two garter snakes, and a tsetse fly entombed in amber. Is it so improbable that the most oblivious, conventional, self-involved examples of the touring public would stop at such a roadside attraction operated by such an idiosyncratic couple? Perhaps it is another of Amanda's “Infinite Goofs.”
Two more characters are introduced before the plot begins to take off. Plucky Purcell is a trickster of extravagant style. While Amanda and Ziller are merely non-conforming individuals, rejectors of the isms that imprison thought, Plucky is a guerrilla agent of disruption. Some of the most colorful passages in the book are his revisionist explanations of motorcycle helmet laws and of the symbiotic relationship between organized crime and organized law enforcement. Money and power fuel society he avers. Marx Marvelous is a scientist. His journal entries and observations clog the air with vapid erudition. Gradually, he opens himself to change. It begins with the sight of a clear-cut expanse: “Every hillside, every ridge is bare except for stumps and slash: a cemetery of forlorn stumps, low-spreading barricades of rain-rotted, sun-bleached slash....These murdered hills were for untold centuries green....Now they are barren, devastated, splintered, twisted, silent....” (p.175-176) he writes in his journal. The everyday tourists criss-crossing the country are no longer innocuous by the end of this book; he writes instead of their “aggressive mediocrity” (p.242)
Plucky's story is the engine of this book. He stumbles on a body in the forest and assumes the man's identity as a bit of a prank. The dead man turns out to have belonged to a sinister enforcement arm of the Catholic Church. The gun-toting brotherhood is housed in a monastery headed by a mirthless German cleric. Plucky is a jiujitsu expert. By coincidence this was the specialty of the dead man. These adventures are relayed to Amanda, Ziller and Marx Marvelous through a trickle of hasty surreptitious letters. Robbins drops hints of Plucky's future situation with intriguing references throughout the book about “The Corpse.”
This was a difficult book for me. Though interesting, the characters were extremely bizarre and the lack of an apparent storyline was perplexing. I did not really become invested in the book until Plucky Purcell was introduced. His rants against authority were refreshing and his involvement with the monastic hit squad were hilarious. It only gets better with his irreverent observations of the Vatican when he embarks on his special assignment.
The book adheres to an unexpected structure. Hints about “the Corpse” are dropped just enough to solicit anticipation. The relationship between Amanda and Ziller creates a tension between insightfulness and absurdity. The surprises revealed in the character of Marx Marvelous parallel the changes that occur in his intellectual viewpoint, and afford the author enormous flexibility in the writing style he adopts.
In fact it is the writing that makes this book memorable. Like his character, Amanda, Robbins “float[s] above the predictable.” (p.208) Hardly a page goes by without not just a quotable line but entire passages. Here is Plucky's description of the monastery capo Father Gutstadt: “...Gutstadt's Latin was even more dense than his English. His nouns were like cannonballs and his verbs, well it would have taken two men and a boy to carry one. It must have been the heaviest mass on record, a massive mass, if you'll excuse me. It's a wonder we didn't sink through the earth from the weight of it.” (p.185) The third person narrative permits him to expound on themes of genocide, pollution and unsustainable materialism, but these themes gain emotional impact from the absurdity that feeds Robbins' humor. Any aspiring writer MUST read this book.

NOTE:
The book was written in 1971 but feels astonishingly contemporary.

Not my favorite Tom Robbins - though the discourse on the merits or demerits of organized religion is rich. Robbins' language is magical, even if the book dragged in parts.

Δε χρειάζεται να πω πάλι κάτι για τον Ρόμπινς! Η οξυδέρκειά του πλέον είναι πρόδηλη σε κάθε βιβλίο του! Κάθε επιλογή βιβλίου του αποτελεί αναγνωστικό οργασμό, μια έκρηξη αισθήσεων που δε θέλεις να τελειώσει. Νιώθω πως μπαίνω σε ένα σπίτι κ ανοίγοντας την πόρτα κάθε δωματίου βρίσκω κ ένα διαφορετικό παράδοξο για πολλούς αλλά τόσο παράφορα γοητευτικό για εμένα κόσμο.

Robbins is one of those writers I probably should have read in college, when my English Lit friends were raving about him. I probably would have liked him more then, but my tastes have changed. Neo-mystical hoo-ha doesn't charm me like it once did. I also find his portrayal of Amanda disturbing. The male characters seem to worship her as a mother Earth goddess figure, but on closer inspection they only thing they care about is getting the chance to bang her. She's merely a highly objectified dingbat, and not some admirable free-spirited heroine. Gave it 2 stars (as opposed to 1) because his writing is clever and funny and he has a distinctive style.

I first read this book roughly 30 years ago, and I’m pretty sure I would have given it four or five stars back then, this time it felt a bit convoluted, like the author was trying pretty hard to be always witty with words and metaphors and eccentric characters. Social issues that were hot button nearly 50 ago when the book was published felt hippie-quaint to me today. Still, the book’s jousting against the unstoppable force of the Catholic Church and governmental power structures in general, plus its environmental messages, still ring pretty relevant.

Amanda had peed in Seattle, she had peed in Everett. And now as they sped through the Skagit River Valley, she had to pee again. Already, she and John Paul were far behind the caravan that motored to Bellingham (near the Canadian border) where, on the campus of Western Washington State College, the circus was to unfurl its canvases for the last time.

In approximately 1999, I picked this book off the shelves of the main library at the abovementioned college, by then rebranded Western Washington University. I don't think this was my first novel by Robbins, to whom I'd been introduced by Gus Van Sant's screen adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This was around the same time I took a Post-Modern Literature course where we read The Handmaid's Tale and Blood and Guts in High School (later I wrote a post-modern essay conversing with Kathy Acker about how much I hated her book).

At any rate, I have fond memories of Robbins' novels as quirky, insightful, and bawdy. A year or so ago, I was in a book rut and a friend (who lives in Everett, site of the second peeing, about 25 miles north of Seattle) suggested Robbins as her favorite author. I thought I'd read through his short oeuvre (only eight novels, an autobiography, and a collection of short stories and essays) in chronological order. That's not working out so well, because I'm finding my tastes have changed.

Written in 1971, this novel was Robbins' attempt at recreating the 1960s on the page, in a non-linear plot, written as a first-person POV report. In the first chapter, we meet a young psychic named Amanda:

"There are three things that I like," Amanda exclaimed upon awakening from her first long trance. "These are: the butterfly, the cactus, and the Infinite Goof."
Later, she amended the list to include mushrooms and motorcycles.

We do and don't know much about Amanda. She's a teen mom, with an "enormously fat" father and apparently no mother, who lives in Arizona. Dad is apparently wealthy enough to have a lawyer, to buy Amanda a performing bear, retired from the Moscow Circus, and to take his daughter to Europe.

"What would you like to see first?" Amanda's father asked his budding twelve-year-old upon their arrival in Paris.
"I'd like to visit the brothels," answered Amanda, scarcely looking up from her onion soup. Amanda's papa refused to take his pubescent daughter into the Parisian fleshpots, but he did point them out to her from the window of a taxi.
Whereupon the child asked, "Father, if you were in a whorehouse and you couldn't finish, would it be permissable [sic] to ask for a bowser bag to take the leftovers home?"

After her exiled Polish prince/rock-and-roll singer boyfriend is caught trying to smuggle exotic butterfly eggs into the country for her, Amanda signs up as a clairvoyant with the Indo-Tibetan Circus and Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band, which is where she meets and immediately marries John Paul Ziller. There's a whole other cast of characters who, along with the narrator, wax philosophical about drugs and the economy and morality as a social construct. Again, it's the sixties in novel form. While that was apparently charming in 1999, in 2022 I found it boring.

And then there's Robbins' excessive use of figurative language:

On the same page (53 in my library copy), a cucumber sandwich is described thusly:
The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf.

And then we get this description of the ITC & GPGBB manager at the end of tour:
On Tuesday morning, there was an unseasonal frost. The grass looked as if it had been chewing Tums. Across the antacid residue, Nearly Normal's boots jitterbugged from camp to camp: paychecks to dispense, good-byes to exchange. From camp to camp he trotted through his own breath like a riot cop charging tear gas. His glasses steamed over, his nose was its own gas mask.

I couldn't even make it through the first 100 pages. Considering that what I remember about ECGTB is a discussion of the difference between virginal and nonvirginal vaginal odor, I think I'll skip that one, too. Maybe I'll give Robbins another try in the future, but I think he's no longer a cup of my tea.

3.5 stars

"Not what I expected," is how my wife and I both summarized this funny, quirky, once-probably-groundbreaking novel about, well, a hot dog stand in Washington's Skagit Valley and the Second Coming (sort of) of Christ. Robbins is a great stylist, falling in the literary yarrow stalks somewhere between Vonnegut and Pynchon, and his characters engage in many engrossing and substantive-if-stoned philosophical conversations, but because most of the action in the story happens off-screen the plot is somewhat lacking. This book was probably a lot funnier and more provocative when it was published 45 years ago, back before the "bad Christianity killed good paganism" meme got a little stale and dogmatic.

Tom Robbins was recommended to me aeons ago by a friend (now an occasional friend). I confess a little disappointment with Another Roadside Attraction, but the depth and range of ideas explored in the book is amazing.

I loved the ludicrous metaphors, the freewheeling insanity of language, the satirical humour and the intelligently argued discourses on the death of religion.

On a craft level, I felt the plot could have used a huge pair of scissors, and many of the characters suffered from having the same voice, or the same habit of launching into erudite philsophical treatises for no reason.

So with a little strimming this could have been a classic. It certainly packs a mean wallop and sits pretty on the bookshelves of athiests and agnostics alike.

One star for the fun/quirky theme of this book. Minus the other 4 stars for the blatant racism no one talks about?

Νομίζω ότι η εποχή που έβρισκα cool και διασκεδαστικο τον Ρόμπινς, έχει περάσει...