Jitterbug Perfume

What Readers Say

Jitterbug Perfume is the kind of book people describe by saying "I read it at exactly the right time in my life." Tom Robbins' style — post-free-love magical realism, funny and sensual and philosophically weird — either does something specific to you depending on where you are, or it doesn't. Readers who love it describe coming away with "an increased appreciation of beauty and life," which sounds like marketing copy but is consistent enough to be real. The love story — between an ancient Bohemian king and his queen, who refuse to die — operates on a cosmic register that most love stories don't attempt. Robbins is described as unique in American fiction, a writer without a real contemporary equivalent.

Who It's For

Readers who have found the more traditional love-story options too earnest or too genre-bound. If you want something weird, funny, sensual, and completely unlike anything else, this is where to go. Also specifically recommended for readers at a particular kind of crossroads — the book treats wandering through life as the point rather than the problem, and readers in their late teens and twenties tend to find it at the right moment.

Reading Context

Still Life with Woodpecker is Robbins' other most-recommended title and covers similar thematic territory in a more concentrated form. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis is the companion text that readers most often pair with Jitterbug Perfume — both are books about men who live too fully and too immediately to fit into ordinary categories.