When I created my LibraryThing account five years later and recorded the book, I gave it five stars. I first read this book in 2002 with the book club I belonged to back then. Sadly, then, this is not a book that this past fan of the author can recommend without reservation. Worse, this storyline quickly became ponderous, often dragging an otherwise breezy tale to a painful halt.

While Robbins is a stylish writer whose clever wordplay and myriad puns still hit more than they miss, his frequent pop philosophical musings on the quest for extending life seemed very contrived and decidedly the product of an earlier era. So, rather than feeling like I was being let in on the Grand Cosmic Joke as when I read Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues so many years ago, my experience this time was quite a bit different. This novel felt hopelessly dated and, unlike the immortality achieved by Alobar and Kudra, it is aging very rapidly and not at all well. What has changed in the past four decades? Me, of course, but then so too has our society and culture and that, I think, is the point. All I can say is that what I liked in the 1970-80s is not at nearly the same as what captivates me now. is Bingo Pajama, a mysterious Jamaican man with a coveted stock of jasmine and swarm of bees that follows him everywhere.I read Jitterbug Perfume about 35 years after it was written and more than 40 years after I was first introduced to Tom Robbins’ work. This effort collides with a battle to recreate an intoxicating perfume based on beets that involves Priscilla, a local “genius waitress,” Madame Devalier, the scion of a New Orleans perfume shop, and the LeFever Parfumarie of Paris. As Alobar and Kudra figure out how to arrest the aging process and “dematerialize,” their paths converge in the present day where a similar desire to cheat death is explored at a Seattle-based foundation led by Wiggs Dannyboy. Their journey leads them to the Bandaloops, an ancient tribe who have mastered immortality, as well as the goat-god Pan, whose own existence is threatened by more fashionable deities.

In his wanderings, he meets Kudra, an Indian girl trying to escape her own death, and the two become soulmates.

At the end of the first millennium A.D., King Alobar of Bohemia rejects his fated demise to search for the answer to eternal life. Jitterbug Perfume recounts a 1,000-year quest for immortality, with plenty of stops along the way to discuss beets and bees and scents and sex.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins