Jitterbug Perfume
Tom Robbin’s Jitterbug Perfume (1984) tells the wild, at times bizarre, story of a number of characters scattered across geography and ages: a Dark Ages king-peasant-philosopher, Alobar; his beloved, Hindu Kudra; a misfit waitress in Seattle, Priscilla; a pair of French cousins whose family has worked in the industrial perfume business for centuries; and two women who comprise a small, even seedy, New Orleans perfume shop in the French Quarter. A wacky, philosopher/swindler, Dr. Dannyboy Wiggs, somehow manages to unite them all with his Last Laugh Foundation. To make the story even more zany, beets—yes, the root vegetable—show up randomly throughout the narrative. Even the god Pan clambers through this novel, a symbol of humanity’s turn away from the physical/natural and toward the intellectual/rational. In Jitterbug Perfume, Robbins investigates themes of immortality, humor, individuality and, of course, love through an outrageous cast of characters and circumstances.
I picked up Jitterbug Perfume because a friend asked me if I wanted to read along with her (it was a reread for her). Having attempted to read a Robbins book nearly fifteen years ago (and failed to finish it), the challenge intrigued me. Thus, began my descent into the fantastic and humorous world of Jitterbug Perfume. So many of the details are at once bizarre and utterly human. Robbins writes in a detailed and crisp style that is smooth and fast-paced. He also develops a wonderful array of unique individuals in his characters. Through the character of Alobar, a medieval chieftain king who flees death time and time again, Robbins finds a means to contemplate the shift away from community-think and towards the individualism of modernity. Pan, the god of revelry and earthiness, embodies this cultural transition the most in the novel. I found the lives of Alobar and Kudra the most enthralling as they rambled through both time and geography on their mission to avoid death. Together they move the narrative into modernity, and ultimately connect with the other characters in their individual quests to craft the world’s finest scent.
At the heart of this novel is humor and the reminder to “lighten up.” Even Robbins’ description of what comes after life is humorous and witty. Jitterbug Perfume seems to suggest that when we lighten up, and remember the connection we have with our natural selves, the possibilities may be limitless. This lesson seems perfectly suited to today’s reader, as so many of us take ourselves a bit too seriously most, if not all, of the time. In this novel no subject is beyond humor’s touch. Robbins’ prose bring levity to all things, even the question of death, as his characters’ stories miraculously weave together by the novel’s close.
I enjoyed Jitterbug Perfume, its many exquisite one-liners, and its complicated cast of characters. Anyone interested in taking a strange (and obviously very fictionalized) tour of Western and Eastern thought from the middle ages to the present, may enjoy this wildly creative novel. And, of course, any champion of the so-often ignored beet will find this book amusing and perhaps even inspiring. In no other novel does a beet seem to take on such a role or significance, a fact, that highlights the strangeness and the humor of this work. I found Jitterbug Perfume both smart and entertaining; it was a perfect book to start my summer reading.
A Few Great Passages:
“Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he’d grown convinced that play—more than piety, more than charity or vigilance—was what allowed human beings to transcend evil” (221).
“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life’s bittersweet route” (222).
“Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received” (383).
Bibliography:
Robbins, Tom. Jitterbug Perfume. Bantam Books: New York, 1984.
