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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 is 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 favour 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 colourful undercover agent, and a Robbins novel is really a colourful 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'a thoroughly postmodern guru' --Independent On Sunday
'In his seventh, and perhaps most complex novel to date, Robbins shines as brilliantly as he has in the past...superb current social commentary' --The New York Post
'Tom Robbins has a grasp on things that dazzles the brain and he's also a world-class storyteller' --Thomas Pynchon
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the mosaic of life,
By Elspeth Fahey (Darkest Wales) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Paperback)
I bought a second copy of this book so I could go to work underlining and dog-ear-ing the pages in an attempt to recall, for future use, the hundred or more glittering concepts I discovered here.Our Hero, Switters, is a walking, talking, breathing, lusting, meditating symbol for the tesserae that make up the mosaic of the sort of life we all either embrace or deny in every moment. He is a pacifist CIA agent, a pragmatic mystic, a part-time adventurer and full-time romantic, and though captivated by the idea of innocence and purity, he lusts after his teenaged stepsister and ultimately finds her affection returned in the most delightful manner imaginable. In one particularly memorable conversation, he tells her, "The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy..." Sounds simple, but taken in context of the moment, it unfolds like a rose, with just as many layers of beauty. The freedom of parrots, a pyramid-shaped head on a South American shaman, Matisse's Blue Nude revealed, Finnegan's Wake, government intelligence policies, the art of stilt walking, renegade nuns and the price we fear we must pay for enlightenment...all these seemingly disparate concepts are not only brought together as a whole, but seamlessly dovetailed to offer an enchanting glimpse of one individual celebrating who-he-really-is by realising that the only price to pay for joy is letting go of fear.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tom Robbins in top form,
By
This review is from: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Paperback)
Tom Robbins in top form. A former CIA agent travels from the US to the Amazon rainforest where he is the subject of a curse that confines him to a wheelchair. Via a sojourn in a Syrian convent with renegade nuns our former agent gets caught up in the history of two religions whilst grappling with his sexuality. All this amidst the literary gymnastics and wit of Robbins prose. Outstanding.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The spy who loved me...,
By Craig Baxter "ba_x" (london, england) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Paperback)
... or more acurately, the spy whose story I loved... Robbins has many strong points: philosophically broad, theologically open-minded, able to string 300 storylines together... but i think his strongest point is in character sketching. Sissy Hankshaw, Ellen Cherry Charles, Bernard Mickey Wrangle and now Switters, who has replaced ECC as my favourite. As mentioned in the synopsis, he's a mass of contradictions, and extremely entertaining for it. I hope TR decides to break mold and write a sequel. Bond wishes he was this cool.
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