Jitterbug Perfume

By Tom Robbins
★★★★☆

Four Things I Liked About Jitterbug Perfume:
1. Beets.
2. Magical realism.
3. Convergence of four narratives.
4. Sheer span and scope of the story - time, place, and content.

This book came highly recommended, but I wasn’t sure if it lived up to the hype until just about the last page. And even then, I wasn’t sure how I really felt about it. On the one hand, I’ve never read anything quite like it before, and I loved the way the last 20 pages coalesced the whole narrative into a final, momentous throb of significance. On the other hand, I was never fully enveloped into the story until those last 20 pages or so, and there was a lot about Robbins’ style I wasn’t sure he was pulling off. But maybe that’s part of the book’s greatness – that it is so wholly unique you don’t even know what to make of it. It certainly had me thinking the entire time, whether I was trying to draw connections between the apparently incongruous narrative threads, trying to construct meaning from a seemingly random assortment of themes and motifs, or savoring the smattering of perfect passages like melted chocolate on my tongue. In any case, I was never passively flipping pages, living only in the current scene while letting the previous one slip unnoticed out of my mind like the memory of last Monday’s breakfast. Instead I was collecting them one by one like cards in hand, on alert for the royal flush.

The novel begins with this line: “The beet is the most intense of vegetables.” And somehow, in the course of 388 pages and a couple thousand years, it evolves from rumination on the passionate qualities of the beet into an elaborate and philosophical tale of love, immortality, divinity, the sacrifices we make to modern life, and the intangible spark that keeps the human condition aflame.

The Prologue begins with a beet, then moves to Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans, before settling on ancient Bohemia, where the real action begins. In three parts, the novel primarily follows Alobar, a former king and his – for lack of a better word – wife, Kudra, who individually cheat death, cross paths, and unite to seek the path to immortality, with the help of the dying pagan god of basic human instincts, Pan. Yet while the majority of the novel is devoted to Alobar’s ongoing quest through the past, each section concludes with shorter chapters set in contemporary Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans, which follow three unlikely perfumers: a waitress by evening who tracks down an elusive formula trapped in the dregs of an old blue perfume bottle by night, the elite LeFever brothers who possess perfumery’s most infallible nose, and an enormous, fills-the-room-with-her-sheer-size-of-body-and-personality woman in charge of a rundown family business nonetheless devoted to the craft. The four separate narratives seem disconnected until the last 100 some odd pages, when Alobar’s time catches up to real time and converges with Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans.

The real power in Robbins’s writing (at least as I’ve experienced it) is in choreographing the ending. All the various threads of plots, characters, themes, and motifs were all smoothly and satisfyingly braided together into a snug and beautiful pattern worthy of an “Ooh” or “Ah.” For a book that starts with a beet, Jitterbug Perfume makes you think an awful lot about life: what it means, why its worth living, what comes afterward, who’s in control.

That being said, it is not a perfect novel. The language is outlandish, metaphors sometimes so much so that they could have been pulled from a bad metaphor list. I get that the extravagancy of Robbins’s style goes hand in hand with the extravagancy of his story, but I waffle as to whether not he pulls it off. And yet there are passages – sometimes single lines – of such acuity that they stop my eyes still on the page and arrest my attention. In lieu of a smooth conclusion, I think I shall simply live you with a couple of my favorite examples and let them speak of themselves:

“If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn’t it follow that the soul require endarkenment to balance enlightenment?”

“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.”

“People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits. That was what Dr. Dannyboy said. Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits. Dannyboy believed that even old age was a habit. And habits could be broken.”

Books Read This Year: 33
Top 100 Progress: 42/100

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

★★★★★

Five Things I Like About Never Let Me Go:

1. The pervasive aura of bittersweet nostalgia.

2. The quiet, melancholic beauty of the prose, reminiscent of English countryside.

3. The dynamics between Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth.

4. The setting.

5. It lingers.

I saw the movie adaptation of this book last fall at the arts cinema close to my house. It was gorgeous, a poignant, somehow bittersweet tragedy. I say tragedy, and I suppose that’s true – it is tragic – but tragedy seems like too… I guess too loud a word to use. Even though the story’s sad, it’s never brazen with its sadness. The sadness creeps up on you, like a high tide coming in, building and building. And then it washes out, leaving behind the empty stretch of sand.

The book is the same way, but better (of course) because it’s more stretched out. Not by there being more to the story, but just by nature of it being a book – it’s unlikely you’ll read it in a single sitting, so the story stretches out over several days, waiting patiently in a pocket of your mind until you pick it up again. And even when you do finish the book, like I said, it lingers.

Never Let Me Go is a story woven of Kathy H.’s memories of growing up at a place called Hailsham in the English countryside with her best friends Ruth and Tommy. It’s like boarding school – the students live in dorms separated by gender and age, they go to lessons, they spend lazy afternoons playing games on the lawn, and they weather the ups and downs of their relationships with their peers. Yet the students are aware, without ever thinking too carefully about it, that they at Hailsham are special. The Hailsham children will grow up to be donors, in an alternate world where cloning is a successful cure to humankind’s incurable killers. Their fate is inevitable, but as they leave Hailsham on the cusp of adulthood (and with it, donations), Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth begin to question things about their time at Hailsham – how they submitted artwork to win a place in a special gallery, how certain topics had an unspoken taboo – and what role they might play in truth of certain rumors circulating amongst Hailsham graduates, rumors of deferral. Never Let Me Go is partly a science-fiction novel, partly a novel about the ties of love and friendship and shared experience, partly a novel about growing older and entering “real life”, and even partly a novel about ethics. But mostly it’s a novel about the human soul.

Though essentially linear and never hard to follow, the narrative moves fluidly backwards and forwards in time throughout the novel, much like the meandering memory process it mimics. I think this tone is one of the things that makes the mournful poignancy of Never Let Me Go so calm and understated without subtracting from its impact – instead of being inundated with the acute flares of emotion aroused by the events as they happened, the reader experiences the contemplative reflection of someone recalling their life knowing their time is soon and realizing that regret will only embitter the memories they have left.

Ah. I can’t go on and do it any justice. Just read it. And then see the movie. Not necessarily in that order – for once I can see a benefit in reversal, in gleaning the visual mood from the movie before reading the book.

Books Read This Year: 12

Top 100 Progress: 39/100

The Sixteen Satires

By Juvenal

★★☆☆☆

I wanted to be super clever and start this off by saying, “Juvenal is juvenile,” but that’s not exactly the right word. What’s a word for “inflammatory, self-righteous, ranting, bitter old man*”? If you think of one, let me know.

Juvenal’s satires are a commentary on what he characterizes as the degradation of Roman society, for which he holds all his contemporaries responsible while upholding the moral and political purity of his forebears. He’s poisoned with nostalgia and thinks the golden age of Rome has come and gone; observing his city makes him feel the way I imagine I would if I were stuck in front of a TV with no remote and forced to watch MTV or South Park 12 hours a day. Or if I were trapped in a modern art museum.

Part of me almost pities Juvenal, because at times his tirades come off sounding more like those of an aging man unable to let go of his glory days or keep up with a fast-paced and transforming society than those of a sanctimonious blowhard. But then Satire VI came around relentlessly ragging on women and with its cruel pettiness cured me of any sympathetic twinges.

What I take from these satires is that, just as human nature has remained constant throughout history, we perceive our societies to be in a constant state of decline. Why is that? It seems that every generation balks at the behavior of the next while glorifying that of their predecessors. But are really we in a downward spiral of corruption that began when Eve bit into that infamous apple? Or are we simply skittish of change? Is this a phenomenon of degradation or evolution?

*Okay. So I don’t actually know if he was an old man. But that’s how I picture him.


Books Read This Year: 7
Top 100 Progress: 38/100