| Villa Incognito | |
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Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author(s) | Tom Robbins |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
| Publication date | 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 241 pp |
| ISBN | 0-553-80332-8 |
| OCLC Number | 51478089 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 21 |
| LC Classification | PS3568.O233 V55 2003 |
Bantam Doubleday Dell (US) and Random House (Australia) published Villa Incognito in April and June 2003, respectively. One of the most quoted lines from the book is the very first, setting the tone for this Tom Robbins adventure: "It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute."
Contents |
Villa Incognito begins with the story of Tanuki, a raccoon-like Asian creature with a reputation as a shapeshifter and trickster with a lust for sake and women. Tanuki is a tanuki; a member of the species named for him. The cast also includes a beautiful young woman who has unconfirmed Tanuki-blood in her veins (but definitely has a chrysanthemum seed embedded in the roof of her mouth), and three American MIAs who have chosen to be "lost" in Laos, long after U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended. Typical Robbins-esque debacles ensue when one of the MIAs is arrested with heroin taped to his body, while dressed as a priest. Meanwhile, two sisters of one of the missing American soldiers are still searching for their lost relative, unfolding bizarre plot twists that paint a caricature of life in a Post-9/11 America.
The author expresses his ideals by punching holes into the military, big business and religions. Such ideas as sexual congress are remarkably expressed by his prose regarding the copulation of a grown man and a 16 year-old girl:
"For them not to have fucked then and there would have required such a reversal of the laws of nature as to cause Newton to spin in his coffin and NASA to discontinue the space program."
The work has a flow of metaphors and similies, with phrases like: "He crooned the way a can of cheap dog food might croon if a can of cheap dog food had a voice"; "Dickie's heart felt suddenly like an iron piano with barbwire strings and scorpions for keys."
The extracts show how Robbins depicts events in an individualistic way. The approach might be vulgar, disgusting, absurd, or even offensive to the reader, but it is intentional. The desired effect is a disturbance just large enough to make the reader see it his way, allowing the readers to enjoy an unusual perspective on the event.
Tom Robbins tends to compare objects with and emphasize genitalia in all things he writes, but his books are never about sex. More often they show sex as a strange, supernatural force that sweeps up the people (and in this case, demi-gods and woodland beings) mentioned in his novels. Villa Incognito is like Robbins' other works in that it has multiple plot threads woven together in diverse and seemingly unrelated ways.
The author understands that before his reader can truly appreciate the message he wants to deliver, he must align their perceptions, even if only slightly, to that of his characters. Using sex, a common taboo in western cultures, is one way he draws a line of relationship between his fictional characters and his readers. This tactic has been used liberally throughout history by professional authors, the Scriptor tantalized the minds of his readers in his depictions of the excesses of ancient Rome, while more recently Nathaniel Hawthorne similarly shocked his readers with sexual themes in his work The Scarlet Letter.
At 256 pages, Villa Incognito is a self-confessed hedonistic yet gleeful work, with the author himself referring to the central character Tanuki as an "Asian combination of, say, Falstaff and Zorba the Greek". Perhaps the best explanation of the nature of Villa Incognito is in another example of the writing, found in this description of Tanuki's music:
"... the drumming sound, one intuits, that the heart used to make before the heart was domesticated and yoked; the thump of pure appetite, (so pure it is almost holy); the pounding pulse of some sweet and terrible unnamed joy. Pla-bonga pla-bonga pla-bonga."
A sense of freedom of movement and being is embodied within the furry confines of the immoral Tanuki, and this pure (and yet lusty) celebration of life and living is what Villa Incognito is about. His characters are aware of their station in life, they understand their circumstances and accept them.
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