Özellikle okurla içli dışlı anlatımı değişik ve güzel, sanırım Tom Robbins'in diğer kitaplarını da okuyacağım.

Tom Robbins plays with language in a way that tickles my mind. What I would give to spend a day in his mind.

I love this book on so many levels: the word play, the metaphors, the characters, the plot, the themes, the atmosphere.

A profound joy to read

right so I didn't actually quite finish this but my #2020readingchalllenge needs all the help it can get (#1898BooksBehindSchedule). anyway boy do I hate Tom Robbins. His presence permeates this book so emphatically that I could feel all his ickiness. Another Roadside Attraction isn't as uncomfortable or offensive as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues theme-wise, but detail-wise theres still a lotta gross in it. ARA also does not quite have as miraculously brilliant of a storyline as ECGTB. But here I am anyway, because Tom Robbins is an absurdly talented writer. may even come back and finish reading this book for research purposes. because when it comes down to it, I read this disgusting man's stuff in hopes that I will absorb some of his boldness, creativity, and general genius

“History is a discipline of aggregate bias.”

“Another Roadside Attraction” is the first Tom Robbins novel I read, many years ago. I recall that read being a bit of a slog for me, and I had no desire to pick up any more Robbins.
Years later I was forced to read Robbins again, as another novel of his was a selection for my book club.

I fell. I fell hard.

Something had changed in the intervening years, and I really enjoy his work now. I have read all but 2 of his published texts, and they vary in terms of quality, but I have enjoyed all and been disappointed by none.

So I revisited this text…and it disappoints a bit. I see why it did not lead me to more Robbins all those years ago.

What is good about the book? The stuff that is usually good with Mr. Robbins: quirky and creative figurative language, some stunning writing (an especially good moment is on page 21 when he describes Native American culture thru the description of an Indian’s performance at a circus). The novel is intricately and cleverly plotted in a deceitfully simple manner. That aspect of the book is really well done. And Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” is even referenced! All those things equal awesome.

But…
At the end of Part II the book kicks into high gear, for a moment. Then it slows down for too much discoursing and philosophy as it meanders into Part III and the introduction of a character I really did not like, Marx Marvelous. This character is a man who discounts all aspects of faith, a rational fool, and I think Robbins dislikes him as much as I do, but he lets him get away with too much in the text. This was Robbins' first novel and it shows. He had not yet learned how to weave philosophy and musings of a deeper nature seamlessly into the plot. For later books he did learn this skill.

Part 4 of the novel descends into tripe. Christianity is bad, all modern religion is a rip off of the far superior earth mother pagan religions of earlier times, and on and on. If I were stoned, and a stupid 20 year old, I’d dig it. This book was published in 1971 and is a product of its time.

Overall “Another Roadside Attraction” is a swipe at Christianity in the guise of a novel and too much philosophic digression to no narrative purpose. Like all Robbins I have read, there are interesting ideas presented, but they get lost in the mire of this book.

I’m so glad his work got better from here.

As wild, entertaining and fun as I expected it to be. Creative to the core and one of those books where almost every sentence seems hand-crafted!

My first Tom Robbins (and his)... This book taught me that he is indeed the literary guru that he and all the coffeehouse cave-dwellers who can't pry their cigs away from their rot stained teeth long enough to save their lives... save 9$!... save my airspace... think he is... and like most egomaniacal freaks who are sure that their spiritual dick is bigger than everyone else's this work is fairly masturbatory-did he not have an editor, a friend, someone to help curtail the gluttony? Did he have no one to tell him that he was cramming ten books into one? Gurus usually surround themselves with suck and swallow yesmen so I'm guessing, "no."
I kept wanting to pack a bowl to battle the nausea-the kind inspired by a one sitting's indulgence of an entire pie. But after one effort I realized that mary jane was not going to help me wade through an already tangentially challenged muck pit. Since I was reading it for my book group I clamped onto the rope of the story line while it dragged me through all of its manipulations and this intimacy made me realize that I actually liked it-the story. A bit 1972-ish, but likable nonetheless. And you'll never catch me protesting the development of a meaty and self-possessed heroine who is worshipped for being so. Also, he gifts the reader with some very beautiful moments... descriptions you can taste... and visuals that will suck you down his rabbit hole. And yet he over gifts (it's a 5$ limit Tom). I enjoyed the "word-find" of Terrance McKenna's influences and the feeling that I was getting a freshly decorated house tour of the Puget Sound (since I am a fairly new resident). But I will leave anyone brave enough to have read this far with the hybrid word I developed to describe my Tom Robbins experience: VERBASIVE.

My first and favorite Tom Robbins book. I re-read this and S"Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" every couple of years. His ability to see the beauty and absurdity of day to day life is pure joy to me.

Κάπως απογοητευτικός Ρόμπινς. Είναι το πρώτο του και νομίζω του φαίνεται. Είχε κάποιες στιγμες, αλλά γενικά με κούρασε.

A fun romp in the Northwest with the overall theme of challenging religion and I guess authority in general. Entertaining and makes you think.

If you can wade through a bunch of pathetic characters, it's a quirky, adult tale filled with humor and random facts of nature. Humor is at times slapstick, at times so subtle you'll completely miss it. Represents all the themes of the 70s (revolution in thought about sex, religion, politics, economics, the arts, relationship of man and nature), some of which are as or more relevant today. Philosophical discussion about western civilization by the characters leads one to think about how society does things and how it is (or isn't) working.

I was struck by the urgency of environmental disaster expressed in this story. The EPA came in to existence the year before this book was published, so there were measurable improvements. Today, once again this issue seems pressing, making it relevant.

Although the first novel Tom Robbins published, this is the fourth novel of his that I have read. All of Robbins' wild style and free association antics are present. The characters are well-drawn, and the free-wheeling style of his prose matches the story and his message. I have to say that I enjoyed "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues", "Jitterbug Perfume," and "Still Life with Woodpecker" more, but to me that only proves that Robbins improved his craft as he continued his career.

In the morning there are signs of magic everywhere. Some archaeologists from the British Museum discover a curse. The natives are restless. A maiden in a nearby village has been carried off by a rhinoceros. Unpopular pygmies gnaw at the foot of the enigma.

Would we even recognize the Second Coming if it happened in our own back yard today? And would we chase Christ away again as a freak and as a radical anarchist as we did before? Tom Robbins offers us an iconoclastic eyewitness account about this momentous event in the history of Mankind, and explains why it will fail to make a splash in the collective consciousness of our modern society.

Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people.

Written with his signature elaborate, colourful and subversive style, the present novel showcases Robbins at his best right from his debut, cloaking his hard-hitting philosophical ideas in a humorous, playful and extravagant coat. The lost and so intensely bad-mouthed Flower Power and its underlying core philosophy of life is resurrected and offered as if on a plate as a viable alternative to the runaway train of economic-driven globalism and to the radicalization of dogmatic religion that mostly delivers global warming and sectarian wars.

Sure, they were somewhat loose in their sexual habits and sure they ingested a lot of drugs – a risky and foolish business – but they were very careful about not hurting other human beings; they practised – not believed in but practised – a live-and-let-live philosophy of tolerance and tenderness, they adhered to an almost severe code of ethics. Their protests and demonstrations, while they may have gotten out of hand at times, were never mindless acts of rebellion; they were aimed at improving conditions for all mankind.

This is structured as a comedy novel on purpose, not only as a vehicle for the author’s wild similes and provocative rants. Robbins considers the medium as the best way to unsettle his audience and make it become more open to novel ideas: something stand-up comedians like Richard Pryor or George Carlin might know something about. Not surprisingly, among the authors name-dropped in the novel, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan feature prominently. Christopher Moore, who wrote “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” might have been on the list if he was active a few decades earlier.

The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. [...] Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown – laughed at, persecuted and despised – playing out the dumb show of his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority.

The common link between these authors may be their conviction that modern man needs more than hard science and a well-stocked larder in order to function. Somebody needs to cater to his spiritual needs, in the role classically filled by the Church with such disastrous results.

Now, suppose we view the Church as the hunting wasp, its stinger being represented by the nuns and priests who teach it in schools. And let us view the pupils as the paralized prey. The egg that is injected into them is the dogma, which in time must hatch into a larva – personal philosophy and religious attitude. This larva, as that of the wasp, eats away from within, slowly and in a specialized manner, until the victim is destroyed. That is my impression of parochial education.
Public secular education is only a little less thorough in its methods and only a little less deadly in its results.

An institution that rejects progress and tries to enforce abusive laws rooted in prejudice and in the desire for control of its flock through dubious rewards in an afterlife or and equally dubious punishments for perceived sins is hardly the safe harbour for the Second Coming. It’s far more likely that He would rather come down in a rainy, richly forested and quiet back-country in the Pacific NorthWest.

Christ, the core symbol of Western religious tradition, is unchanged and unchanging, but we have lost sight of him in the buffeting and confusion and must be trained to recognize the Christ Idea again, albeit in the context of complex Space Age technology rather than a simple agrarian arrangement.

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I noticed that all I wrote so far is about the ideas promoted in the novel, while most of the thrill of the ride was in meeting the Apostles of this Second Coming. The intellectual provocation of the debate is nothing to sneer at, in particular the talent of Robbins to make editorial rants sound funny and incisive, but I am myself a sort of late-bloomer hippie guy and I was thrilled to meet Amanda, the Earth-Mother figure, and her husband John Paul Ziller, a musician-magician and world traveller, alongside their friend Plucky Purcell, a drug-dealing anarchist, and the chronicler of the events Marx Marvellous, an academic researcher out of his depth when dealing with people instead of statistical data. An impresario named Nearly Normal Jimmy and Mon Cul, a trained baboon liberated from a medical laboratory that acts as a babysitter for Baby Thor, complete the cast.

About thirteen months ago, John Paul Ziller married a pregnant gypsy, bought two garter snakes and a tsetse fly and, on the Seattle-Vancouver highway, opened a roadside zoo.

The novel first invites the readership to meet the main actors, than look at the location in the Skagit Valley before weaving a crazy plot involving assassin monks in a secret forest fort near Humtulips, the migration of monarch butterflies, the lost history of Captain John Kendrick, the catacombs of Vatican City and a huge cardboard model of a hotdog.
It all sounds pretty weird on paper, and that is even before I go into details about the Apostles bohemian lifestyle, but let’s not be too hasty in frowning upon these people:

There is no such thing as a weird human being. It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.

Understanding Amanda is easy: born into an upper middle class academic family, she has chosen to follow her gypsy heart instead of her parents expectations and to love without restrictions imposed by society. She’s a vegetarian who forages in the forest for edible mushrooms and has a side-business as a magic ball fortune-teller.

“I’m a gypsy in spirit only,” she confessed. “I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, up stairs, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heroes; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.”

John Paul Ziller has had a more adventurous life prior to opening his roadside zoo: expeditions to Africa and Tibet, a fortune made in innovative musical instruments and popular if esoteric music records, fame from his magic tricks. Ziller is a non-conformist and an agent provocateur.

Ziller had the stink of Pan about him.

Pan is of course the central character of the other Tom Robbins novel I’ve read. “Jitterbug Perfume” revisits some of the themes first presented in this debut novel we’re discussing here, but in my opinion is even better (and wilder)

Pan represented the union between nature and culture, between flesh and spirit. Union, man. That’s why we old-timers hated to see him go.

Plucky Purcell is a former professional athlete turned drug dealer after a field injury. He stands for action instead of words.

Something in his nature has always been intolerant of authority, especially when it is violently imposed upon those who seem neither to need it or want it – as is usually the case.

So let’s allow Amanda, John Paul and Plucky tell the story of their roadside zoo / hamburger stand by the side of the road between Seattle and Vancouver. You might be surprised at how much of the world can be explained with a dead tse-tse fly, a flea circus, a couple of garter snakes, a baboon and a dead body in the pantry.

Whether meaningful or meaningless, the game of life is there to be played.



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Odds and ends that got left out from my review, but I would still like to preserve for future reference. On the fascination and significance of the travelling show:

There was a time when the Americans stayed put. For the majority of them, journeys were short and few. Consequently, their live entertainment came to them. The circus, the carnival, the dog-and-pony show, the wild West extravaganza, the freak show, the medicine wagon, the menagerie, brought to the towns and villages on their muddy itineraries glimpses of worlds which the sedentary folks had never visited.

On the relativity of history:

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

On the exaggerated hatred for religion, or intransigence in general:

One cannot hate society, because within society there are loving and lovable individuals. Similarly, it wasn’t the Church I hated, because the Church contained the bravery and enlightenment of many individual priests and nuns and saints.
The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything.

On freedom and those same authoritarians:

The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can’t have both. Take your choice.