Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

published	2001 by Bantam
first published	2000
binding	Paperback
isbn	055337933X (isbn13: 9780553379334)
pages	464
description	The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic U.S. operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "...more [close] The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic U.S. operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are enormously popular in the CIA," claims Switters. "Not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best." Switters isn't really an invalid, but during his first mission (to set free his ornery grandma's parrot, Sailor, in the Amazon jungle), he gets zapped by a spell cast by a "misshapen shaman" of the Kandakandero tribe named End of Time. The shaman is reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda's giggly guru, but his head is pyramid-shaped. In return for a mind-bending trip into cosmic truth--"the Hallways of Always"--Switters must not let his foot touch the earth, or he'll die. Not that a little death threat can slow him down. Switters simply hops into a wheelchair and rolls off to further footloose adventures, occasionally switching to stilts. For a Robbins hero, to be just a bit high, not earthbound, facilitates enlightenment. He bops from Peru to Seattle, where he's beguiled by the Art Girls of the Pike Place Market and his 16-year-old stepsister, and then off to Syria, where he falls in with a pack of renegade nuns bearing names like Mustang Sally and Domino Thirry. Will Switters see Domino tumble and solve the mystery of the Virgin Mary? Can the nuns convince the Pope to favor birth control--to "zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt" and "wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa?" Can the author ever resist a shameless pun or a mutant metaphor? The tangly plot is almost beside the point. Switters is a colorful undercover agent, and a Robbins novel is really a colorful undercover essay celebrating sex and innocence, drugs and a firm wariness of anything that tries to rewire the mind, and Broadway tunes, especially "Send in the Clowns." Some readers will be intensely offended by Switters's yen for youth and idiosyncratic views on vice. But fans will feel that extremism in the pursuit of serious fun is virtue incarnate. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is classic Tom Robbins: all smiles, similes, and subversion. --Tim Appelo
date added	12-09-06 edit book

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | more...

discuss this book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

friend reviews (0)

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 3970)

Will rated it:

02/14/08

Read in January, 2003

Probably my favorite Tom Robbins novel, one of the few with a male protagonist (some of his books focus on female leads, and a few have couples, but the narration generally focuses on the woman). Switters, the nymphet-chasing secret agent and self described "acquired taste," finds himself confined to a wheelchair. A shaman's curse (the price of a psychedelic revelation) condemns him to death if his feet ever touch the ground. He starts the novel in love with his underage step sister...more Probably my favorite Tom Robbins novel, one of the few with a male protagonist (some of his books focus on female leads, and a few have couples, but the narration generally focuses on the woman). Switters, the nymphet-chasing secret agent and self described "acquired taste," finds himself confined to a wheelchair. A shaman's curse (the price of a psychedelic revelation) condemns him to death if his feet ever touch the ground. He starts the novel in love with his underage step sister, working for the CIA, and fully ambulatory. His adventures take him around the world and through theological intrigue, but the main feature of this book is really Switters as a character. The plot, although clever and fun to follow, is mostly a way of putting him in various situations where he can discourse on the meaning of life, language, and pleasure. A friend of mine who also loves this author told me that Switters seemed to her to be the Tom Robbin's character who is the most like Tom Robbins, and this seems intuitively true. For one thing, the content of Switters' monologues, both inner and outer, echo themes that resonate throughout his other novels, and seem in this novel to be gathered in one voice. Also, the form of Switters' speeches echoes the author's style of wording and imagery. The greatest joy of reading Tom Robbins is the way he plays with language as something oral, something that we hear with our ears and make with our mouths. He does things with writing that can only be done in writing, but he never lets the reader forget that language is something sensual, and he invokes the sounds of words, the music of sentences, and even descriptions that vividly sexualize the mechanics of a character (female or male, but usually female) actually pronouncing a certain word.
Except for Nabokov, who Robbins seems to be pretty obviously paying homage to (and perhaps lovingly mocking) with parallels and allusions to "Lolita," no other novelist I've read has captured the sensuality of language on this level. Languages, accents, and even speech impediments seem to be elevated to the highest objects of aesthetic appreciation in Robbins novels. Robbins can write a conversation, or a thought about a conversation, or even a thought about a word with as much guilty, indulgent enjoyment and libidinal gravity as anyone else can write a sex scene. An employee at an independent bookstore (Liftbridge books, Brockport NY, highly recommended) that Robbins is one of a few specific authors who they regularly argue over putting in "fiction" or "literature," and his work does have the same guilty-pleasure value of trashy novels, and always seems to end happily. Despite that, as someone who appreciates language as something that is at once abstract and intimately connected to us as bodies, I find great intellectual value in his work. ...less

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

title link
avg rating
small image
med image
large image

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

discuss this book

friend reviews (0)

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 3970)

book data (includes all editions)

blog this book

popular shelves

other editions

quote