Not being in the mood, I traded the book for the TV remote and started looking for a football game-any football game. Slavic people get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.I felt like I’d arrived late to a dorm party where everyone is already high and giggling nonstop over a silly in-joke.
The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. It took me fifteen minutes to get past the first page: So I pulled Jitterbug Perfume off the shelf and hit the sofa. The guilty weight of these accumulated semi-promises caught up with me this past Thanksgiving as I was looking for something to read between dinner and falling asleep on the couch. So I tell people yes I remember it but I’d have to read it again before opining on the quality of Tom Robbins’ olfactory genius. While Robbins dropped a detail here and there to prove he’d done some research on the perfume business, it was clear that he was also peddling a lot of hokum. What I remember is an overly-long and overly-zany comic tale featuring characters with names like Bingo Pajama and Dr. I read it when it first came out-back in 1984. My response is polite but deliberately vague. Don’t I agree that it’s a great novel about the sense of smell? When I speak to an audience about olfactory genius in the literary world, someone invariably asks about Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.
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