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Villa Incognito
Authors :
Tom Robbins
| Release Date: |
29 April, 2003 |
| Manufacturer: |
Bantam |
| Availability: |
Usually ships in 24 hours |
| List Price: |
$24.00 |
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 Customer Reviews 
recommended only for the Tom Robbins completist
Rating: 2
For such a brilliant opening line, the rest of the book is just trampled hot trash. A thin plot with even thinner characters wrapped around... Well, there was no kernel to wrap all that around. A few enjoyable moments in a gracefully short novel but a stain about this author's name.
Slippery lipidity is not enough
Rating: 1
Robbins may have flown tush over teacup into the literary stratosphere with a succession of sporadically acclaimed and not infrequently best-selling books, but he hasn't forgotten his roots. As he explains in Villa Incognito: "All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a plane higher than lard could ever hope to fly."
Isn't it so? Do we not, as a polity, gloriously wallow in "this inanimate seductress, this goopy glorymonger, this alchemist in a jar."? Or are our grocers misreading us when they proffer the never-ending discount on slipperily lipidic eggy whiteness at the end of aisle three?
The author of nine weirdly contorted and squishily sexy romps, from Another Roadside Attraction (1971) to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), to my favorites, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) and Jitterbug Perfume (1984) and on to the vaguely disappointing Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (2000), and the equally recherché current title, Robbins is not a prolific writer. As he said in a 2000 interview with January Magazine " ... I probably spend as much time on one sentence as John Grisham spends on five chapters."
In that interview he limned his muse thus: "What I try to do, among other things, is to mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in combinations that have never quite been seen before in literature."
Perhaps what pales for longtime readers is that we have seen it before, in Robbins' own work. Perhaps, also, this explains why his core audience remains post-adolescent, a demographic for whom much is new. Nor is this a damning critique -- someone needs to be the can opener for young, impressionable brains. But dashed hopes are hard on the heart, and Prozac is no substitute for the hope that Robbins' rabbit hole romping would carry us past his leering Jabberwocks into Canaan or Sybaris.
In a nutshell? Don't bother with this one.
I'm not big on Fantasy
Rating: 4
and sex with animals (even in folklore) makes me a bit squirmy, but Robbins is certainly a clever, entertaining bastard!
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