Jitterbug Perfume
Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight (Paris time).It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle.The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
9mentions
9people
2017–2025years
78% recommend22% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A great book that has perfume as a major plot point is "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins.
- Check out Tom Robbins if you haven't already! Here's the opening to Jitterbug Perfume:
> THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables.
> The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
> Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
> The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...
> The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. 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 was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
> In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——.
> Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)
> An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."
> That is a risk we have to take.
- For some magical realism heavily featuring perfumes, read Jitterbug Perfume
- No idea how much I'd like it if I'd read it today, but 'Jitterbug perfume' by Tom Robbins is probably the one that I liked most (or strongest), of all the books that were favourites at different times in my life.
- Subjective it may be, but the greatest opening line in all of literature is surely:
"The beet is the most intense of vegetables."
From Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.
- May I suggest the excellent “Jitterbug Perfume” by the incomparable Tom Robbins? It’s an all-time favorite.
