Customer Reviews

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

5 star:		(129)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I went to see a performance of "Stomp" - and I sat there with this silly grin on my face throughout the whole exciting, creative and heart thumping event.

It's the same silly grin I had on my face while reading this novel - and for the same reasons. I love the way this man writes - he makes me fall in love with language and ideas all over again. I am rolling in the language the way a dog rolls in a particularly pungent patch in the woods - and I am loving every redolent moment.

I suppose those who feel that Mr. Robbins' work contains unbelievable plots twists are looking for something a little too linear in this surreal world - but as for me, the whole process of living itself is pretty darn non-linear and full of unbelieveable plot twists.

I am particularly fond of the diatrabes on religion and advertising. I love the thoughts regarding Mary and the possible reason why she never mentions Jesus .....

"Jitterbug Perfume" caused me to shift into a permanent suspension of disbelief, and I was thrilled to get this booster shot.

No one else writes like Tom Robbins. But thank goodness he does. Not only does he tell a ripping good yarn, but the language he uses shows you that he obviously takes the time to chew and taste each sentence thoroughly. He is in love with words, and it shows on every page. He takes an ordinary scene and makes you see it in a completely new way. For instance, he describes a sunset as the sun dropping like a gold coin into a slot and ocean biting the coin to make sure it is really gold. And you can actually SEE it right along with him. It's so damned, as Switters calls South America, "VIVID."

I've read every Tom Robbins book, except I'm not quite done with this one yet, but it promises to be just as wild and exhilerating of a ride as any of his best ones (which in my opinion are Jitterbug Perfume, Skinny Legs and All, and Still Life with Woodpecker).

Tom Robbins tops my list of people I'd like to go drinking with. I highly recommend that everyone go out and read this, and every other one of his books.

Tom Robbins' books fall into three categories for me:

I. Pure genius (incl. Roadside, Cowgirls, and Jitterbug)

II. Respectable flights of fancy (Skinny Legs)

III. Lukewarm efforts (Still Life, Frog Pajamas)

That's not to say that all in (I) are five-star champions and all in (III) are horrible one-star waste of times. I've never come across a viable reason to give anything Tom's written less than four-stars (on the Amazon.com scale). Fierce Invalids is no exception. It is a third-tier Robbins book, but that makes it better than 99% of the drek out there.

It's unique (not "most unique") in the Robbins' oeuvre for one simple reason: a male protagonist. Switters is the literary equivalent of a bipolar disorder: he hates organizations, yet is a member of both the CIA and a convent; he believes in laughter as the road to Nirvana, yet he carries a Beretta with him wherever he goes; he's world-wise and pragmatic, yet spends the last two third of the story confined to a wheelchair due to a shaman's curse. This theme of binary opposition runs rampant through the book, and it gives the reader something tangible to hang on to, something Robbins usually is hesitant to do.

Midway through the narrative, I realized that all that I enjoyed about the first half of the book has been destroyed, and I was wondering how Tom would pull it all together in the end (he always does). He does -- although slightly more melodramatic than usual, I was satisfied with the knots he made to tie up the loose ends.

As for his most unique (couldn't help myself here, Tom) ability to wield the swords of simile and metaphor, it has never been sharper. My favourite: "Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon." It's like haiku, that line.

For the Tom-completist (of which I am a recent member), pick it up and bask in its glory, cause you may not hear a peep from the old man for another five years. For the Tom-newbie, go back to Roadside, and save this one for another day.

Tom's books represent, literally and figuratively, everything unique and fun about this country.

Tom has the uncanny knack of not just pouring you the juice by which to quench your soul's thirst, but also inserting a life line I.V. to ensure it hits its' target. No effort asides from sitting still and allowing the juice to run its' course is required. Needless to say Tom's juice is full of paradox, adventure, laughter, and philosphical meanderings. Simultaneously acting as a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, an hallucinogen, and a guided meditation, this book, like all of Tom's work, is, more than a great story, it's Finnegan's Wake-up call to the cultural malaise of the one true enemy: a mundane existence; a life without curiosity.

In conclusion, Tom is FUN!

I am only 150 pages into this book, but I know already: it's the best yet. I am taking the book as slow as possible in the event that we must wait another painful six years for the light of Robbins's intellect to shine on us again. Interestingly enough, my grandmother is the person who introduced me to the genius that is Tom Robbins. Maybe that is why I have such a fondness for the Maestra/Switters relationship. But that's just the tip of this glorious iceberg...

Recently, in the midst of the millenium madness, I saw Martin Luther King, jr. and Ghandi identified as prophets of our age, and I wondered why the Fabulous Mr. Robbins was not included. Read it, and you'll understand. ...or maybe I'm just biased cause there's a Texan in the book.

(To the first-time Robbins reader: I recommend beginning with Still Life with Woodpecker and Skinny Legs and All before picking up this tome, which incorporates a few of the more important themes in his previous works.)

When the Art Girls spirited boat competition reaches full throttle and the two most ambitious combatents create a Christ that walks on water followed by one that additionally pulled skis, the end was indeed near for me, I nearly choked to death on my own laughter.

Robbins has the genius to tickle the delightful parts of our brain just enough to open us to the realization that ANYTHING is possible and then he justs pours in the slippery suggestions and what a wonderful ride it is. Much more than just reading a story I actually feel as if my senses are more keen and aware and the comedy of daily life more apparent as I trundle thru my work day with bits and flashes of last night and this mornings quick reads spinning thru my memory.

I am now just 3/4 of the way thru it and the truth is I am writing this review as a way to keep myself occupied so I don't go getting all greedy and finish it tonight. So actually I don't know about the "outcome" of this romanti-tragi-comedy but I am absolutely certain I don't want it to end. If anyone has an idea for how to morph a book with an everlasting gobstopper? ......PLEASE COME FORTH

Some of my favourite books are by Tom Robbins: Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Skinny Legs & All. I was ecstatic to receive his new book. But I was not enraptured of the slow start. Slogging through the literal jungle, I found myself thinking of other, more interesting things I could be doing: root canal, ingrown toenail surgery - but pressing onward had its rewards. The information and plodding plot lines in the first half are, I suppose, necessary to set up the thoroughly entertaining noncoincidences in the second.

Robbins still has his "festive manner of speaking" but Fierce Invalids lacks the punchy panache of the previous publications. [Sigh] I guess we're all getting older ...

The novel exudes the anti-consumerism of Jean Kilbourne's *Deadly Pursuasion* with the CIA-as-monster subtext of Grisham's *The Brethren.*

I found the whole Lolita complex preoccupation to be unnecessary.

As always, Robbins gives us points to ponder. For instance, on the clarity of speech:

"Could you pull off there? " she immediately asked, pointing ... to a gas station. "I really have to use the bathroom."

"Say toilet, would you darling. I don't believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides."

"Whatever."

"No, it's not unimportant. Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support it can get."

Of intelligent speech, Tom Robbins remains a master.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates works its literary magic quite literally all over the world and all over the worlds of human significance, refusing to leave anything out of this particular helping of the Robbins mojo. There's not a hemisphere of the globe or the brain not shuffled into this surging meditation on male and female sexuality, on disenfranchisement and freedom, on brotherhood and (S)sisterhood, on love and friendship, on belief and doubt, and on the paradoxes out of which life emerges. In this world, the heroic dimension of Pee Wee Herman breaks on through the absurd cant of political demagogues, and pyramidically-headed Amazonian shamans grasp the truths of the human sould much better than do Presidents or Popes. The defrocked, whether nuns or CIA operatives, realize the value of their beliefs in the very moments that cut them loose from the more stultifying tedium of their official chores.

As in other Robbins novels, it is when we are in the presence of those who believe they know what's right or best for others that we are in the presence of evil, here represented by the more orthodox members of "Organizations" like the Roman Catholic Church, the CIA, and the IRS. Robbins's protagonist, one recently defrocked company operative named Switters, plays the point man in this fast-break of a novel that weaves its way through the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon River basin, and the Syrian desert, with a toilet stop in Vatican City. Like Bernard Wrangle and Larry Diamond before him, Switters provides the guts, brains, vision, raunch, and dedication to this friends and his philosophy that drives this novel. That Switters drives a wheelchair and stalks the desert sands on stilts for much of Fierce Invalids renders him only slightly less agile than Isaiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, or Michael Jordan at their high-flying, twisting and turning best. Best yet, the conditions that prevent Switters from making full contact with the earth give him a perspective from at least three inches above terra firma, a silly three inches, perhaps, but a silliness that grants him the perspective of the Bodhisattva, whose enlightened state enables him to act in but not of this world. Robbins doesn't settle for that dichotomy, however, and Switters wants it all, his glory is being in and of the world, and deep in the pudding of life, intrigue, mystery, and those Walt Whitmanian "procreative urges" that glorify this tour of duty. Switters revels in his missions, whether they place him in harms way freeing an aging parrot into something resembling his native habitat, delivering arms to Kurdish freedom fighters, or struggling to satisfy the yearnings of the purest forms of innocence.

Fierce Invalids teems with brilliant creations, its metaphors and boldly imagined scenarios no less than its characters like "Don't Call Me Grandma" Maestra, Today is Tomorrow, Bobby Case, Sisters Domino Thiry, Mustang Sally, Zu Zu, and Bopb. Robbins's finely reslized dialogue writing couples with some of his most brilliantly realized locales and situations to make this novel something like the ultimate Tom Robbins novel, at least to date.

Some might still regard Robbins as a "philosopher clown," but we have to remember that phillsopher clowns are philosophers, after all, but ones who believe that languages other than the jargon ridden argots of drily acaemic philosophy ferret out the intricacies of the human condition better than do the often pointlessly abstruse musings of the ivory tower. In Fierce Invalids, Robbins wrestles with all the demons, all the complexity of modern existence and luxuriates in a joyful embrace with the absolute and to mingle with the mud, the blood, and the beer of daily urges and ideas. This is one spectacular read!

It is written in the Koran -- you will come to know if you read this book -- that, "The gates of paradise open wide for he who can make his companions laugh." And wide will the gates of paradise open for Tom Robbins when he takes his celestial walk. This is a hilariously funny trip inspired by the author's vivid imagination. Fans of Tom Robbins, of which I am one, have come to realize (as he told us in Still Life With Woodpecker) that just when you think you are settling into a good story, you discover philosophy is what you're getting. This latest work is long on story and short on philosophy (as compared to Woodpecker), but what uplifting philosophy it is.

One could describe the plot, but it just would not matter. Plots for Robbins are just a vehicle for the author's vibrantly witty iconoclastic social commentary. The protagonist of this story, a re-called CIA agent named Switters, has been accused by many reviewers as being unsympathetic. Personally I think this aversion has to do with a collective uncomfortableness over his being confined to a wheelchair for most of the plot. Switters is cursed by a medicine man in a Peruvian jungle and his death is foretold in the event his feet ever again touch the ground. Based upon what happened to his previously cursed companion, Switters takes the curse to heart and secures himself in a wheelchair for prophylactic purposes. Shed your fears and let your feet touch the ground: is the overly embellished variation of the "smell the roses" theme which is a common thread to all of this authors work.

The author's mission, in the guise of story-telling, is to rescue the human race from its tragic flaw: prideful narcissism. "Isn't that where all this `seriousness' comes from? A dilated ego?'" We must set ourselves free, Robins urges, and purge ourselves of societal taboos ("superstitions with fangs on them, [which] if not transcended, puncture the brain and drain the spirit"). Robins coaxes us to behave like the Ancient Greeks and Hindus. "As a path to liberation, these golden Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their culture's prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that which frightened embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past it. It was a casting out of demons." Along with philosophy, you get some anthropology as well.

Tom Robbins, like Thomas Pynchon (who gives Robbins high praise on the inside dust-cover --- need one say more!?!), is somewhat a recluse. He does not partake of the promotional hype by which other authors hawk their books, and even the About-the-Author- descriptions that append his books provide very little information. He is an under-appreciated literary treasure. The body of his work (this is his seventh novel) is Jungian philosophy as kitsch entertainment, and yes: "Everything is connected. But the links can sometimes be hard to uncover." p. 286.

I had this dream the other night about Tom Robbins. In it, he was a book store owner and he had a pet pelican who had plumage similar in color to a Doberman Pinscher. What does that have to do with this book? Well a book has to be pretty good to affect me that way. Amazon wants me to limit my review to the book's content. That is like asking someone to describe the Grand Canyon in one word or less. Plot is more or less irrelevant. Most dialogue is more internal in nature, and trying to pigeonhole this book is like trying to hug a dust devil. The bottom line is that while I may not be able to adequately describe what the novel is "about," you should read it because, like most of his novels, it will change you in some subtly sublime way. And that is important.