Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates [Paperback]

The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic U.S. 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's 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 favor 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 colorful undercover agent, and a Robbins novel is really a colorful 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 the Hardcover edition.

Fans of Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume; Still Life with Woodpecker) will be delighted to find that his first book in almost six years contains many of the elements they have come to expect from this imaginative author. Sex, sedition and similes abound in a tale of loves both indictable and divine. Unlike Robbins's previous work, however, the novel's story line, though typically eclectic, feels contrived. Switters, the protagonist, is an errand boy for the CIA, a secret lover of Broadway show tunes and a pedophile. On assignment in Peru (he has been ordered to verify the philosophical commitment of a new CIA recruit), Switters encounters a Kandakandero medicine man who gives him mind-altering drugs and wisdom, but in exchange inflicts a curse: if Switters's feet ever touch the ground, he will be struck dead instantly. So Switters spends the rest of the novel in a wheelchair, although this in no way slows him down. He returns to Seattle, chases after his 16-year-old stepsister and numerous art students, then embarks on a mission to Syria to sell gas masks to Kurds; there, he beds a nun who even so remains a virgin. In true Robbins style, the writing throughout is lush and sexy, containing a great deal of witty social and political commentary. But this time around, his story fails to catch hold until too far into the text. And although Robbins's signature prose is in effect here--he mentions, for example, "a pink wink of panty"--he leaves too many loose ends dangling. Agent, Phoebe Larmore. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

A witch doctor with a pyramid-shaped head, an aged parrot whose only words are "People of zee wurl, relax," and an isolated band of nuns that possesses the last remaining copy of the Virgin of Fatima's mysterious third prophecy all figure into Robbins's latest seriocomic foray. Wheelchair-bound Switters, the "fierce invalid" of the title, is a wisecracking CIA operative and James Joyce aficionado. While in South America meeting a new recruit, he journeys to the Amazon, where a witchdoctor places a bizarre curse on him: he will die immediately if his feet ever touch the ground. Switters takes on a mission to the Middle East for a renegade ex-agent. Sidetracked in the Syrian Desert, he forms an unlikely alliance with the nuns as they battle the Vatican for ownership of the prophecy. Best-selling author Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) balances the comic and the cosmic much as a juggler might balance a kitchen chair on a spoon. Highly recommended.
-DLawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Robbin's seventh novel is an incredibly humorous and completely outlandish romp through the world of international intelligence. Switters is a young CIA agent who has a wacky old grandmother who breaks into his e-mail, and he has the hots for his nubile, much-too-young stepsister. As we join Switters, he is on his way to Peru for business purposes; when his grandmother hears of his intended destination, she persuades him to take her pet parrot back to the jungle to liberate him. Switters' almost-beyond-belief Peruvian adventures pale in comparison only beside what awaits him on his next assignment, in Syria. He's in the Middle East to run gas masks to the Kurds. But because of a curse put on him in the Amazonian jungle--a warning that if his feet ever touch the ground again, it will be curtains for him--he has confined himself to a wheelchair. So he gets to the Middle East and what does he do? He takes a sojourn in a convent full of defrocked nuns, whose abbess was the model for a Matisse painting of a nude that just happens to be in the possession of Switters' grandmother. He even gets involved in a touch-and-go struggle over a Vatican secret: the controversial third prophesy made to three peasant children by the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, the nature of which has been sealed in Vatican archives since then. The high jinks couldn't be any wilder here, but Switters is such a likable guy that the reader comes away envying his untamed life. Brad Hooper --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Long-term hospital patients or transcontinental Greyhound riders might happily kill time trudging through Robbinss lectures on every hackneyed social evil from advertising to dogmatism. Everyone else, skip over the pages-long polemics, and enjoy a whimsical tall tale of a pot-smoking, teenager-shagging CIA agent who travels the globe in hopes of shaking a South American shamans curse. A trip up the Amazon to repatriate his grandmothers parrot finds the Zen-meditating spymaster Switters peace-piping with a jungle-dwelling guru who, in exchange for a drug-trip-cum-glimpse-of-divine truth, exacts a price: Switters's feet must never again touch the ground, lest he be struck instantly dead. Any doubt in the curses authenticity bites the dust when his acquaintance, similarly cursed to die upon touching another mans penis, keels over the moment he gingerly prods, as a test, Switterss purposefully exposed member. Switters, taking no chances, rolls himself back to the US in a wheelchair, determined not to allow his feet on the ground until the curse is undone. Temporarily distracted from his predicament by lust for his 16-year-old stepsister, he solicitously assists with her school paper on the prophecies of the Lady of Fatima and then, through a series of amusing, unbelievable plot twists, ends up in a convent of excommunicated Catholic nuns in the Syrian desert where the Ladys prophecies are actually kept. Switters now finds himself in requited yet unconsummated love with one of the chaste, and arbitrating the convent's potentially life-threatening dispute with the Vatican. One way or another, all is resolvedfrom curse to pedophilic crush to Vatican standoffwhen Switterss feet finally do touch the ground again. A lot of fun, but less so if an overdeveloped sense of reader-duty wont let you pass by the plot-stopping diatribes that have become Robbinss habit (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1994, etc.). (Author tour) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"Superb."—New York Post

"As clever and witty a novel as anyone has written in a long time ... The plot is sustained by [Robbins's] usual virtuoso writing and brilliant flashes of insight. ... Robbins takes readers on a wild, delightful ride. ... A delight from beginning to end.-- Buffalo News

"Dangerous? Wicked? Forbidden? You bet. ... Pour yourself a bowl of chips and dig in."—Daily News, New York

"Robbins is a great writer ... and definitely a provocative rascal."—The Tennessean

"Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction never read a Tom Robbins novel. ... Clever, creative, and witty, Robbins tosses off impassioned observations like handfuls of flower petals."—San Diego Union-Tribune

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn’t merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters’s strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the “true” Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins—that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer—at the top of his game. On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it’s a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.

"Superb."
-- New York Post

"As clever and witty a novel as anyone has written in a long time ... The plot is sustained by [Robbins's] usual virtuoso writing and brilliant flashes of insight. ... Robbins takes readers on a wild, delightful ride. ... A delight from beginning to end."
-- Buffalo News

"Dangerous? Wicked? Forbidden? You bet. ... Pour yourself a bowl of chips and dig in."
-- Daily News, New York

"Robbins is a great writer ... and definitely a provocative rascal."
-- The Tennessean

"Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction never read a Tom Robbins novel. ... Clever, creative, and witty, Robbins tosses off impassioned observations like handfuls of flower petals."
-- The San Diego Union-Tribune

Tom Robbins has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy’s Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962.

Lima, Peru
October 1997


The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken. It was so old it had lost every single one of its feathers, even its pinfeathers, and its bumpy, jaundiced skin was latticed by a network of rubbery blue veins.

"Pathological," muttered Switters, meaning not simply the parrot but the whole scene, including the shrunken old woman in whose footsteps the bird doggedly followed as she moved about the darkened villa. The parrot's scabrous claws made a dry, scraping noise as they fought for purchase on the terra-cotta floor tiles, and when, periodically, the creature lost its footing and skidded an inch or two, it issued a squawk so quavery and feeble that it sounded as if it were being petted by the Boston Strangler. Each time it squawked, the crone clucked, whether in sympathy or disapproval one could not tell, for she never turned to her devoted little companion but wandered aimlessly from one piece of ancient wooden furniture to another in her amorphous black dress.

Switters feigned appreciation, but he was secretly repulsed, all the more so because Juan Carlos, who stood beside him on the patio, also spying in the widow's windows, was beaming with pride and satisfaction. Switters slapped at the mosquitoes that perforated his torso and cursed every hair on that hand of Fate that had snatched him into South too-goddamn-vivid America.

Boquichicos, Peru
November 1997


Attracted by the lamplight that seeped through the louvers, a mammoth moth beat against the shutters like a storm. Switters watched it with some fascination as he waited for the boys to bring his luggage up from the river. That moth was no butterfly, that was certain. It was a night animal, and it had a night animal's mystery.

Butterflies were delicate and gossamer, but this moth possessed strength and weight. Its heavy wings were powdered like the face of an old actress. Butterflies were presumed to be carefree, moths were slaves to a fiery obsession. Butterflies seemed innocuous, moths somehow...erotic. The dust of the moth was a sexual dust. The twitch of the moth was a sexual twitch. Suddenly Switters touched his throat and moaned. He moaned because it occurred to him how much the moth resembled a clitoris with wings.

Vivid.

There were grunts on the path behind him, and Inti emerged from the forest bearing, somewhat apprehensively, Switters's crocodile-skin valise. In a moment the other two boys appeared with the rest of his gear. It was time to review accommodations in the Hotel Boquichicos. He dreaded what he might find behind its shuttered windows, its double-screened doors, but he motioned for the boys to follow him in. "Let's go. This insect--" He nodded at the great moth that, fan though it might, was unable to stir the steaming green broth that in the Amazon often substitutes for air. "This insect is making me feel--" Switters hesitated to utter the word, even though he knew Inti could understand no more than a dozen simple syllables of English. "This insect is making me feel libidinous."

Tom Robbins is famous for detailed prose that describes a character's psyche as casually as his physical makeup. This audiobook continues the trend with the adventures of Switters, one of the most psychologically complex characters Robbins has ever created. Keith Szarabajka tackles the outrageous text, as well as its subtle nuances, and delivers a performance that is compelling and energetic. It would be easy to get bogged down in Robbins's narrative asides and way- out rants, but it all works out in the end and Szarabajka presents the tale with finesse. It's a pleasure to have another Tom Robbins audiobook and even better to have it narrated so well! R.A.P. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.