sjsanc

Garbo.

This is a strange book. I don't mean it has endearing quirks or interesting oddball ideas – it's strange because the writing is irregular in tone and quality, the pacing erratic, the settings somehow clear yet myopic, rambling. Not bad per se, but definitely adventurous down the wrong fork in the road.

It's a book about a self-loathing and reads like an extended greentext. The author drags you through his demented world as if he's recanting the events to a therapist, complete with the expectation that you'll pick through the narrated wreckage and refrain from kicking him out in disgust.

Not that your disgust should be very visceral, that is. The infantile “beatdowns” delivered in the first half of the novel were so glib as to be almost not worth the space they take up. A simple “I like abusing women – that's the premise” would have been as effective.

As for the entire ending scene...if you were able to cultivate any sort of emotional response from beneath the author's hack affectations (switching to second-person? stripping dialogue? why, to illustrate his mental haze and absurd paranoia? He's sober for god's sake!) and bizarre chain of events, you would probably be left thinking...is that it? Is that all they can muster? He hurts them and they stage weird pantomimes about his manhood and spike his drinks? Why are there so many people just hanging around like villainous stooges, laughing like extras in a comedy?

The narrator is 35 or thereabouts by the time the novel ends, but I'm betting Anonymous is in his early twenties. If you want to real novel about sexist misanthropy read Mishima's Forbidden Colours instead.

Difficult to follow, unnecessarily referential; am I supposed to have Wikipedia open whilst reading pop philosophy?

I like Slavoj's brand of leftism. It's bold, unapologetic and he doesn't try to intellectualise concepts away into obscure inaccessibility. I don't always agree with the implicit morality beneath some of this arguments, but that's neither here nor there. This book is just hard to read – not in a “Kant is hard to read” but in a “this Facebook comment chain keeps getting derailed”, (before they introduced nesting replies, of course). Stick to the point!

In short: achingly poor writing sustaining a sometimes exciting plot. However the Moties (despite being utterly humanoid, which, for a work of speculative fiction should really be considered a faux pas, or at least a tut-tut) were often a joy to listen to chatter, especially the three ambassadors at the draw of the novel, who provided more insight into the Motie psyche than the however-many-snippets of dialogue that came before. Definitely a side-eye thrown at the expressive interjectional use of “rape” though.

We often think of certain emotions having a particular colour. Anger is red, jealousy is green. Critics might call a piece of music melancholic, brash or aggressive. A sommelier might claim the experience of the tasting a particular wine can lead us think of nostalgia, masculinity, and notes of wet concrete. I once had a white rum from the Dominican Republic that tasted like bacon fat.

Why should our experience of reading prose be any different? I'm not just talking about plain metaphor. Writing can easily appear flat and lacking vibrancy like a chastised soufflé. It can be electric and fast, bouncing like an EDM track in your head, or nagging and slow like thick gorse. Just as our senses can stumble over each other, creating quirky synaesthesia in our conscious broadband, so too can written prose produce its own weird experiences.

Jitterbug Perfume is written like a Jackson Pollock painting and illustrated like an episode of Superjail. The story and characters, locations and sensations are all strung along like the floating pinpricks of fairy light, suspended in the night sky by Robbins' irreverent, erratic and disillusory prose. Each paragraph has its own smell and colour, a lecherous goblin coxswain beating its own languid pace and yelling obscenities at its page mates. It is a book to be tasted, so full of imaginative detail and filigree that an eye could never appreciate it all. I'd even go as far as say that some of his metaphors defy visual understanding (as the many-buttocked thighs of Seattle with have acknowledge lmao).

Curiously, no one in Jitterbug Perfume is egocentric or domineering. Few of the characters seem to know or care that they're meant to be holding up a plotline, readily enjoying themselves in sticky carnality and critical musings. Free-wheeling paragraphs lean out from the page to spritz us with and erotic vapour to keep us in a daze, distracting us from the sock hung over the doorknob as the protagonists take a literary five. It takes until the last third of the novel for the different subplots to even lift their head from the sheets and acknowledge they're all in the same room.

This is a book that needs to be enjoyed before it can be read. The cast will stamp their feet in frustration if you approach them with too serious an eye. The poetry will blow a raspberry if you try and question its melodrama. In order to appreciate the absurdist theme, the lewd topnote and the beet-red basenote of laughter that holds it all together as a base, you'll need to first ask yourself: am I ready to smell fun?