Okay, here’s the deal. I was confronted by quite a few people as to the nature amd quality of this book. In most cases books can be summed up in a couple of sentences. Hell, if you really wanted to get simplistic you could just use keywords. This book has so much going all at once, I found it difficult to analyze it in a neat, simplistic manner. So thus, all that asked me about this book, this is for you and your insatiable interest in books.
Jitterbug Perfume
A self described epic. The back of the book hardly gives you anything to go on as to whether you would like it. It states that it begins in ancient Bohemia and ends in Paris at nine o’clock tonight (Paris time). It is also a saga, it states, and thus has a hero and he is a janitor. He has a missing bottle. It’s blue, ancient, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. It let’s you in on what’s inside the bottle. The essence of the universe, and it’s leaking. I purchased this is a new age shop on my trip to Washington. I had already read the introduction about seven times, but somehow as fate would have it, never actually get a chance to purchase it. Thus, Jitterbug and I have had an odd relationship at the get-go. I stood up from where I was squatting down to look at the craziest version of a statue of Kali I had ever seen, when I about walked into a book sticking out. It was a book on Ayn Rand’s writing. (This book led me to read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.) I pulled it out, curious. Another book fell out with it, and into my hands fell Jitterbug. The elusive book that I had tried to find multiple years, but had slipped under the radar for multiple reasons: couldn’t remember the name of the author, seller didn’t carry it, or just didn’t come to mind. I felt as if perhaps it was waiting for the right moment in my life for me to read it. But I digress…
So anyways, the back of the book is pretty vague, altogether. If anyone who is reading this knows of Tom Robbins, has read his stuff, rest assured you will like it. He has become one of my literary gods. His writing is very unique and out-of-the-box. But that is what probably makes him an acquired taste. The introduction begins by talking about the beet, naturally. If the introduction doesn’t get you, I don’t know what will. The book then begins in present time in: Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans. Once you are introduced to the characters at all three locations, Priscilla, Marcel the Bunny, and Madame Devalier and Vlu Jackson, you are transported hundreds of years previous to the forests of Bohemia where a king is attempting to evade regicide. This is what brings us to our first and omnipotent theme.
Eternal Life and Youth/ Death
King Alobar is the first of his kind. He doesn’t wish to die and resents that he is expected to, once he shows the signs of age. He isn’t afraid of death but bitter towards it. He evades death once more and meets the god Pan, who is dying, also. Christianity is weakening him, for the diminishing of believers causes him to lose strength. Eventually Alobar will learn to cheat death and remain young and healthy along with his wife Kudra, whom he meets as a child in India. Kudra doesn’t at first agree with this morbid obsession with outwitting death, but after years with Alobar, she learns to enjoy life to it’s full capacity. Although she is never afraid of death or resentful towards it and feels it is part of true eternal life. Alobar doesn’t want to die and find there is no eternal life waiting, to waste this life for eternal death.
Smell
Another big topic in this book. I never thought I would know so much about perfume. Scent has changed our lives entirely. Each one of us has been effected by scent. Our brains become more and more olfactory based each generation. Visual sense is becoming less of a factor in our lives simultaneously. Olfactory senses made long-term adaptations in the brain, including size. It seems that sometime in the future, if we keep going in the same direction, we will become virtually all olfactory senses. Smell can be credited to multiple things in our lives that we hardly notice since they are in our nature to be intuitive. It is expected for perfume and scent to be a big topic because, Kudra is one of the first to wear body oils and scent to cover her own. Priscilla, a genius waitress is obsessed with finding the base note for a perfume she found in an old blue bottle, Vlu Jackson and Madame Devalier have a perfume shop in New Orleans where they have met a man named Bingo Pajame who has a crown of bees swarming about his head and the sweetest Jamaican jasmine, and Marcel the Bunny, is joint owner in Lefever Perfumes and is obsessed with scents and perfumes.
Beets…
… and what they embody. I don’t want to give EVERYTHING away, and trust me, I haven’t. There is someone going about leaving a beet behind at the Priscilla’s apartment, Marcels office, and Vlu’s bed.
Truly, this book has so much going on, it is difficult to name all of the themes and all that it goes into without spoiling. Although Robbins goes out in a million directions at once, the lines seem to tie together nicely, making a big nest to lay in.
I would just like to inform everybody of one more thing. This book is sexual. As long as a mature reader keeps in mind that it is a natural thing and that everybody has a sex drive, the book and you will have a wonderful relationship. I am just letting you know that it occurs quite a bit in the book and people that shy away from such content could possibly get an ulcer reading this book.
