Jitterbug Perfume

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**Title** **Jitterbug Perfume**
First edition cover
Author	Tom Robbins
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Bantam USA
Released	1984
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	342 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-553-05068-0 (first edition, hardback)

Jitterbug Perfume is Tom Robbins' fourth novel, published in 1984. The major themes of the book include the striving for immortality, the meaning behind the sense of smell, individual expression, self-reliance, sex, love, and religion. Beets and the god Pan figure prominently. The novel is a self-described "epic," with four distinct storylines, one set in 8th century Bohemia and three others in modern day New Orleans, Seattle, and Paris.

1 Plot summary
2 Popular Quotes From the Novel
3 Trivia
4 Release details

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A powerful and righteous 8th century king named Alobar narrowly escapes euthanasia at the hands of his own subjects, as it is their custom to kill the king at the sight of his first grey hair. After fleeing, no longer a king but a simple peasant, he travels through Eurasia, and eventually meets the goat-god Pan, who is slowly losing his powers as the world turns toward Christianity. In India, he bumps into the adult incarnation of a child he used to know, Kudra, who goes on to become his wife. As with most of Robbins' couples, their mutual libido is enormous, and their love quite like something out of a fairy tale.

After an encounter with a mysterious group known as "The Bandaloop," Alobar is set down the path towards eternal life (which, according to Robbins, can be attained by a consistent ritual of sex and bathing). Alobar and Kudra, successful in their immortality, prance about Europe until the 18th Century, when they attempt a sort of new transcendental meditation and become separated into different astral planes.

Meanwhile, in present-day, a "genius waitress" named Priscilla struggles with a difficult job in a low-end Mexican restaurant. Priscilla is an amateur perfumer, and is slowly going crazy trying to locate a base note for her new fragrance, something she believes will be almost magical, a fragrance she discovered in the gift of a thousand-year-old bottle. While dealing with this, she also juggles the unwanted advances of a lesbian co-worker, a brief affair with an eccentric millionaire obsessed with life extension, and a mysterious stranger who keeps delivering beets to her apartment.

In New Orleans, Priscilla's stepmother, the Madame Devalier, is a successful perfumer, and is also working on a fragrance of her own, intent on taking on the big companies of Paris. She also seeks something magical — the ultra-fragrant jasmine from a mysterious man with the helmet of swarming bees, Bingo Pajama.

In Paris, the LeFever Parfumaire is concerned about their eccentric leader, Marcel, who equates smell as the most important factor in the forward movement of the evolutionary process. After witnessing an eclipse, he is obsessed with his own scent.

The story lines eventually converge into a climax in New Orleans, with a brief stop in another dimension. The main message is summarized in the cryptic "Erleichda," loosely translated as "lighten up."

[edit] Popular Quotes From the Novel

Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray.
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.
If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.
The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.
In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.
I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.
You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.
Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.
She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang.
... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.
Some of the professors and physicians were rather shabby; they were men too clothed in ideas to pay much attention to grooming.
The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.
...the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it - neither nature nor God would stoop so low.
As to the quality of the beer we cannot testify - perhaps a taste of it today would leave us sadder Budweiser.
My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.
Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.
There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.
I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction.
Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!
Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.
A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.
A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.
Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.
They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm.
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.

[edit] Trivia

In the somewhat esoteric final lines of the book, note this: "And then you'll be blue. Bluer than indigo." This is based on an old Chinese proverb by Xun Zi: blue dye is made from indigo colored grass, yet the blue dye's color is much deeper than the color of its origin. In other words, the pupil can exceed the master.