Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates [Paperback]

The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic US 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 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.

'one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world' --The Financial Times

'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

'B' format edition of Tom Robbins most recent novel which is being released alongside re-issues of 'Still Life with Woodpecker' and 'Jitterbug Perfume' - both also in 'B' format editions. 'Tom Robbins has a grasp on things that dazzle the brain and he's also a world-class storyteller' - Thomas Pynchon 'In his seventh, and perhaps most complex novel to date, Robbins shines as brilliantly as he has in the past...superb social commentary' - New York Post

Tom Robbins has been called "a vital natural resource" by The Portland Oregonian, "one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world" by the FT, and "the most dangerous writer in the world today" by Fernanda Pivano of Italy's Cirriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962. He is the author of six other novels including Still Life with Woodpecker and Another Roadside Attraction.