Both Pan and Kudra are familiar with death and express a desire for some alternative to it. In his travels East, Alobar meets the Greek god Pan and an eight-year-old Hindu girl named Kudra. With the advice of a shaman, he sets off for the country of the Bandaloop because, he is told, they have discovered the secrets of immortality. Alobar decides that he would prefer never to die. After a year, however, another set of arbitrary norms threaten to cut his life short. This attempt fails, and he escapes with one of the members of his harem, settling down in a distant village. It is customary to kill and replace the king at the first sign of decline, so Alobar attempts to hide the evidence. Though the book opens on these modern-day characters’ lives, they take second stage in Parts 1 through 3 and return to the narrative’s forefront in Part 4.Ī thousand years in the past, King Alobar, the ruler of a small, proto-Bohemian kingdom, discovers signs that he is aging.

They all receive anonymous deliveries of beets. Claude and Marcel, members of the famous LeFever family, run a perfume corporation in Paris. Lily Devalier runs a small parfumerie in New Orleans with the assistance of V’lu. Priscilla Partido, a quick-witted waitress, lives in Seattle.

Shelf Talk is created and maintained by the staff of The Seattle Public Library.The novel quickly introduces the main characters. Switters, a pacifist CIA agent who embraces all his self-contraditions, must travel to a Moroccan nunnery to rid himself of a curse that keeps his feet off the ground. Trailed by several sentient inanimate objects, Ellen Cherry Charles travels to New York in an aluminum roast turkey to bring art and transcendence to Middle East politics.įierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Exiled by his subjects when his first gray hair comes in, King Alobar seeks immortality and finds it through his reincarnated mate Kudra, the Greek god Pan, and the smell of beets. Born with enormous thumbs, Sissy Hankshaw puts them to good use by becoming a hitchhiker, traveling to New York to model for a gay feminine products tycoon who sends her along to the Rubber Hose Ranch, where she meets the transcendent Bonanza Jellybean. Redheads, pyramids, alien conspiracies, and the philosophy of life. This was mind-bogglingly weird, and I wanted more. Here are a few of my favorite Robbins novels.Įven Cowgirls Get the Blues. The title intrigued me, and then the plot itself, such as it is. I am not sure when I first started reading Tom Robbins, but I’m guessing it was some time in the ’80s, and I know it was when I picked up at a used bookstore a copy of his early work, Still Life with Woodpecker.

Alobar jitterbug perfume