Jitterbug Perfume in SpecFic Buddy Reads

Mar 25, 2013 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: top-one-hundred, satire, fantasy, 2019-shelf, traditional-fiction

Tom Robbins in this book opened my eyes to the wild, wild world of modern satire, absurdity, light-hearted comparative religious blasphemy, and BEETS.

Just ignore the stench that just entered the room... it's only my old pal and buddy, PAN.

Drunken revelries are pushed aside for the enjoyment of tons of sex, hot baths, and more sex as the keys to immortality, but if you think that's just fine for a novel like this, THINK AGAIN. A genius waitress working in a Mexican restaurant in Washington State ...more

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Jan 28, 2019 Trish rated it really liked it

This was … a trip. Simultaneously several road trips in parallel to one another and A TRIP. Maybe I’ve sniffed that perfume bottle one too many times.

We start in Seattle with meeting part-time waitress and amateur-perfumer Priscilla. Then, the focus shifts to New Orleans to a perfumer / shop owner (the stepmother of the aforementioned waitress) and her assistant before shifting once more, this time to a large perfume company in Paris. Yes, it’s all about the smell.
Like the godawful smell of Pan This was … a trip. Simultaneously several road trips in parallel to one another and A TRIP. Maybe I’ve sniffed that perfume bottle one too many times.

We start in Seattle with meeting part-time waitress and amateur-perfumer Priscilla. Then, the focus shifts to New Orleans to a perfumer / shop owner (the stepmother of the aforementioned waitress) and her assistant before shifting once more, this time to a large perfume company in Paris. Yes, it’s all about the smell.
Like the godawful smell of Pan (see what I did there ;P).
But there is another level to the story, because in the 8th century, a powerful king successfully escapes regicide (it’s tradition in his kingdom to be killed off at the first signs of aging). He travels the world through the centuries, meeting a widow in India. Yes, there is a love story and some immortality there, too.
But what does all that have to do with a 300-year-old bottle with only a few drops left of the perfume it contained? And, most importantly, why are there beets everywhere?!

The author has a very peculiar writing style that not everyone will warm up to. At times, he’s almost cartoonish, some of the views on women (as seen in descriptions and comments) are definitely dated (the book is from 1984) but never too offensively so if you ask me.
Like I said before, it’s a trip. A trip through time, a trip to discovery (of several things), a trip through a world of astral planes and ancient deities.
And the author managed to incorporate quite a number of musings that may seem weird at first glance (like "Why would you even invest so much time into thinking about this?!" weird) but are actually spot-on and not as trivial on second glance. However, he does so in a very light way so you need to pay attention to notice it in the first place.

It’s certainly not the best story I’ve ever read (the middle plateaued for a while) but it’s solid and I enjoyed the flair of it as I’ve never encountered a story quite like this before - the weirdness and writing style made me chuckle often. In that regard it certainly also fit since it’s a story about Pan and that guy was seriously weird. Consequently, I did as the author intended: I simply enjoyed myself. I’ll still not warm up to beets however, and that’s final. ...more

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