Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
by Tom Robbins
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tom RobbinsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-05-29
ISBN: 055337933X
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Bantam
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780553379334
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
Book Review: Fun, intellectual, and philosophical - This book blows the m
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved this book. I read this book only ten pages at a time. After each sitting I would swim in what I had read, wanting the book, this pocketful of uncomfortably honest ideas, not to end. I loved the attitude of the protagonist and the author, which lifted the spirits on every page. You can tell the author loves words, he loves people, and all the baggage that comes with them. This is a very important book. There is real meaning in every page and the wonder of fresh perspective leaps out. I imagine almost any seeker who reads this could feel connected to this book. As would the lover of English language.
TECHNIQUES:
I love the way he concisely captures human interchange. Describing a manner of flirting:
Not infrequently, he'd spot one of them in the market again and exchange with her one of those futily desirous smiles that are like domestic postage on a letter to a foreign destination. (186)
What a way to describe the perfunctory nature of the countless harmless street flirts !
The book is about the quest for truth - the truth of the soldier, the truth of the wise man, the truth of the romantic, the truth of the outcast. The protagonist, Switters, aims to be a sort of amalgam of these. He is an agnostic, perhaps even an atheist, but he is a decent man who believes in and practices integrity. And he has aspects of a holy, God-aware man. And which person who seeks to find truth is not seeking to be closer to God?
There are 4 parts to this book, each centered aronud a different mini-quest in Switter's immediate life. Part 1 treats the topic of Switter's trip to South America, which involves a mystical communion with a completely different value system, that of the Kandankandero Native American. Part 2 is about Switters attemtps at relationship with his love, innocent and sexual, for Suzy, who is taboo of sorts. Part 3 is about Switters in the Middle East, finding a wholly different (yet similar) kind of love with the radical nun Domino. And Part 4 is the anti-climax of sorts, the apotheosis of an absolute, happy ending.
THEMES AND PERSPECTIVE:
There is no topic off-topic in this book. The boundaries between ideas shed themselves as the author's mind explores new possibilities, interfaces, and dicoveries. Robbins alternatingly (but connectedly) ponders language, sacredness, paradox, innocence, romance, culture, and subversion. They retain the readable nature of an internal dialogue. Politics, religion, sex, spirituality, culture, language, these are the themes treated in this book. Even when I didn't agree with the author, I had to admit he has an enormous charm and sensitivity.
He stretches language to its limits, but you bask in his creativity, which is rarely presumptuous and usually a source of joy.
copyright 2002 o.a. azam
Summary of Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn?t merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters?s strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the ?true? Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins?that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer?at the top of his game. On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it?s a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic U.S. operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are enormously popular in the CIA," claims Switters. "Not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best." Switters isn't really an invalid, but during his first mission (to set free his ornery grandma's parrot, Sailor, in the Amazon jungle), he gets zapped by a spell cast by a "misshapen shaman" of the Kandakandero tribe named End of Time. The shaman is reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda's giggly guru, but his head is pyramid-shaped. In return for a mind-bending trip into cosmic truth--"the Hallways of Always"--Switters must not let his foot touch the earth, or he'll die.
Not that a little death threat can slow him down. Switters simply hops into a wheelchair and rolls off to further footloose adventures, occasionally switching to stilts. For a Robbins hero, to be just a bit high, not earthbound, facilitates enlightenment. He bops from Peru to Seattle, where he's beguiled by the Art Girls of the Pike Place Market and his 16-year-old stepsister, and then off to Syria, where he falls in with a pack of renegade nuns bearing names like Mustang Sally and Domino Thirry. Will Switters see Domino tumble and solve the mystery of the Virgin Mary? Can the nuns convince the Pope to favor birth control--to "zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt" and "wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa?" Can the author ever resist a shameless pun or a mutant metaphor?
The tangly plot is almost beside the point. Switters is a colorful undercover agent, and a Robbins novel is really a colorful undercover essay celebrating sex and innocence, drugs and a firm wariness of anything that tries to rewire the mind, and Broadway tunes, especially "Send in the Clowns." Some readers will be intensely offended by Switters's yen for youth and idiosyncratic views on vice. But fans will feel that extremism in the pursuit of serious fun is virtue incarnate. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is classic Tom Robbins: all smiles, similes, and subversion. --Tim Appelo
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