In New Orleans, Priscilla's stepmother, Madame Devalier, a once successful perfumer, is also working to recreate the same fragrance as Priscilla. She attempts to ignore the mysterious deliveries of beets she keeps receiving at her apartment. She begins an affair with an eccentric Irish philosopher, Wiggs Dannyboy, who runs a clinic for immortality research called the Last Laugh Foundation. She rejects the sexual advances of her co-worker Ricki. Meanwhile, in the present day, Priscilla, a part-time waitress and amateur perfumer, is stalled in re-creating the fragrance from the last remaining drops of a three-hundred-year-old perfume bottle in her possession. Pan encourages Alobar to continue East in search of the masters of immortality.

Eventually he stumbles upon the stamping grounds of the pungent goat-god Pan, who is slowly losing his godly powers as the world turns toward Christianity. After fleeing, no longer a king but only a man, he travels through Eurasia, on a newfound quest for the secret to longevity. The book was first published in 1984 by Bantam Books and later published by Random House.Ī powerful and chiseled 8th-century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, from a custom of killing the leader at the first sign of aging. Orchestrated by a mysterious Irish philosopher, the past and the present collide when the characters come together and discover the unexpected path to life-everlasting. The story connects dueling perfumers in Seattle, Paris and New Orleans to a bottle of incomparable perfume created by two unlikely but defiant lovers of the past who seek immortality. The book follows two interweaving storylines, one in Ancient Eurasia and one in the present day. You will definitely enjoy this, but I would recommend reading his other titles first.Jitterbug Perfume is Tom Robbins' fourth novel and was listed on the New York Times Best Seller list in 1985.

If you like Robbins and have read his other work. I still got a happy fizzy feeling reading this, but with the rapid conclusion of developing plots, the reader is left feeling a bit cheated in the end. Still, it is Robbins, so you'll find some of the most playful use of English and structure around. This really feels like a story that he just got tired of writing and so he tied it together at the end real quick. This novel follows the same formula as his other books, and it seems that half way through, he got bored with writing another novel about absurdity, gurus, and wahoo and decided to just end it. That being said, Villa Incognito was a bit of a dissapointment. Many people would argue that Robbins never focuses very much on plot or story, but I have found his stream of consciousness adventures to be some of the most fun, clever and engrossing books that I have read.

Some great sentences, but an incomplete story

Villa incognito by tom robbins