Jitterbug Perfume Tom Robbins Analysis

Tom Robbins, 82, is a hyper-imaginative writer who watches his own life desirously. He writes his books that are unpredictable, wildly entertaining stories with solid social and rationality undercurrents. He 's also a New York Times bestselling writer, wrote eight books since the mid 70 's. His fourth novel, Jitterbug Perfume (1984), starts with four epic stories from past to future, themed around the quest for eternality. It takes us from old Bohemia and the Himalaya Mountains to present day Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris. The events of Tom Robbins are so clearly affected in his writing that his life history influences the plot, characters, setting, and style of Jitterbug Perfume. Robbins’ life history, especially the psychedelic drugs that …show more content…
Back in the 60’s, he once used lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) that influenced his life, one of the significant things that made Robbins a popular writer. According to English professors Catherine E. Hoyser and Lorena Laura Stookey, they stated that Robbins took LSD that affects his consciousness and his ability to expand his thinking, “Drugs were not necessarily an escape from reality for the early partakers, but rather… effort at mind expansion”(10). He consumed drugs by going on to an unrealistic, magical adventure in his mind and new perspectives. Reading Jitterbug Perfume resembles going on the greatest hallucinatory fantasy trek of the readers life. He takes the reader inside his mind to mind warping places, for instance, …show more content…
Throughout the plot, four of the characters are connected through past and present, with apparently nothing in common toward the start of the story, put something aside for an affection for aroma and the appearances of unexplained beets, at last all discover their apparently extraordinary motivation joined in a common hunt down internal peacefulness. National Review Journalist Michell S. Ross wrote a book review about Robbins’ plot, “it would not be possible to give an adequate summary of Jitterbug Perfume 's plot. There isn 't one, really…As for characters, who are cosmically connected in a universe that does not add up perfectly”(44). Jitterbug Perfume is one of those novels that talks about existence. The novel describes as the celebration of the joy of individual expression and self-reliance. The opening of the page makes the readers change the way they think about beets, the book starts with this line on the first page: “The beet is the most exceptional of vegetables”(Robbins 1). Over the span of 342 pages and a thousand years, it advances from the characteristics of the beet into a detailed and philosophical story of eternality. Readers are starting to love beets since beets has an amazing relationship with connections of the heart. Beets have an earthly flavor and an intense blood-red color. It’s odd that Robbins mentioned beets in his novel, because the beets played a