Villa Incognito: A Novel

I agree with other reviewers who have suggested this not be the first Robbins book you read--start with Skinny Legs and All (my personal favorite), Jitterbug Perfume, or Still Life with Woodpecker. This is a short and light book which I found to be entertaining airplane reading; it occupied me for about half of a Boston-to-Phoenix flight. I agree with others who found Stubblefield's character and the ending to be somewhat of a let-down. I enjoyed the tanuki parts the most--and have enjoyed myself perusing other information about tanukis on the web as a result.

here are five things to know about this book, some already mentioned by previous reviewers:

1. it is what it is.

2. those new to Robbins should not start with this book, but it is great nevertheless. start with Still Life and work your way up from there.

3. you are what you it, and tanukis are real.

4. not his best, sure, but not his worst, by far - I mean really - anyone would need a retreat to the mountains of Laos after producing genius like Fierce Invalids.

5. there are no mistakes.

enjoy!

Villa Incognito is probably Robbins's simplest and least complex book, but comparing it to books written by anyone else in the world shows that it is not simple at all.

This book is very straight forward, entertaining and wonderfully written. It is pure entertainment and very stimulating. Plus, it talks about how awesome Hellman's mayo is, something no one can disagree with.

Tom Robbins is a very smart, funny writer with no apparent end of inspiration. His humor can be sweet or raunchy. He puns shamelessly. And yet...these books stay with me for years. OK, so I just read this one and the images are still dripping down the screen of my mind's eye, but still. His language alone is enough to make you want to re-read a sentence every other paragraph, for the beauty and for the pure invention contained therein.
I still like "Skinny Legs and All" best. But this one is close. Very close. Fans should not be disappointed. Newbies should read his entire oeuvre in order, for no particular reason other than watching this smarty pants' brain expand over the years!

I love Tom Robbins, his work is - usually - bright, funny, and entertainly while maintaining a level of intelligence not often found in contemporary literature.

Villa Incognito falls far short of this mark. I should have expected angry political rhetoric from a book centered partially around Vietnam MIAs, but Robbins waxes ridiculous. Every third page has a vent about the US gov't, either how stupid it is, or how innefectual, or corrupt, or even (and this made me really angry!) an insinuation that the gov't had definite warning about 9-11 before it happened.

Instead of the modern, clever, even romantic Robbins I was accustomed to, I found in Villa a petty attack on every institution he could think of.

I don't know if Tom Robbins was recently dumped or what, but without the sweetness which real romance (as opposed to the pathetic tripe in Villa) adds to his work, it's sorely dissapointing. Maybe he's gotten too comfortable with his popularity, but I'll think thrice before paying good money for Robbins next work.

alright! if you haven't read Tom Robbins before, don't make this your first one. it is really a wonderful book but his others are more thorough and enlightening. Suggestion: read many other Tom Robbins books until this one turns-up at a resale bookstore or until it is released as a paperback.
that's it kiddos...

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.

"It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute," and so starts the tale of the Saki drenched antics of the mythologized Tanuki, which leads the reader on a an amusing adventure. Knock, knock? Who's there? Vietnam Vets who opt to stay in Lao's with a penchant for philosophy, cultivating and dispersing opiates. Knock, knock? Who's there? Three generations of asian woman who um...carry on a magical tradition of sorts..let's say they bloom. Robbins is a master of language and storytelling. The reader goes back and forth from Laos to Seattle. You get a dash of politics, mythology, some 9-11 and the circus, what more could you ask for? It's a quick read and thoroughly enjoyable.

I use this space to say TomRobbins is so metaphorical, tropological, exegetical, interpretational, hermeneutical, definitional, constructional, semiological, trolatitious, figurative, sesquipedalian, so to speak. Your fan, Lee

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.

This is an easy read that goes quickly. It covers themes of Vietnam war, but not really. It kinda reveals that all we did there is not finished. I know it is easy to forget the past -- heck we've already jumped into another Vietnam type war in the same generation. This is not about the war, nor foreigners really. It is about Americans who adapted in an entertaining way to the crazy world the leaders built for them. Expect the usual Robbins zaniness. A fun read.

Not Robbins' best but still damn good. After all, it has Robbins' one-of-a-kind voice, one of those stories shot from the other side of the moon, and an exotic setting. A swell read for any Robbins fan but a book to avoid for squares who can't take the wild world of Tom Robbins.

Hard to top Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. This book was tough to get through but did start to pick up 2/3 of the way through. I read it with a dictionary in hand and learned a few new vocabs. The mix between fantasy (Tanukis and Kitsune) and real life

allegories didn't seem to jive so well. None of the characters were really well developed. Personally would not recommend it, sorry Tom you are a genious and would beat anyone at srabble but felt this one was a bit of a sramble...

This book presents us with the stylistic condensation -- of Tom Robbins' generally garrulously wonderful stoner-erudition -- into a polished metaphorical gem which elucidates the meetings of sacred and profane, East and West, man and woman, art and politics -- and much more -- in the context of recent Southeast Asian history and expat sentimentalism...A virtually epigrammatic masterpiece.

While this novel is different from Tom Robbin's former works, it is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking piece. Yes, he does deal with some politics in it. No, it's not always clear who the protagonist actually is. But take it as it is, with an open mind. I prefer an author who experiments over time, and Mr. Robbins appears to be doing that with this book. It may not be for everybody, but I loved it.

Everyone is a critic, especially when they can't come close to other's talent. If Robbins hurried here, it is probably because many of the messages in this book are about immediate threats to us all. His finger in the eye of American Political and religious institutions ring a true and ominous "clang" of warning. If you don't "get it" you are thinking too hard.
Chill out and have some champagne and moyonnaise sandwiches.

Basically this book is an elaborate defense of promiscuity and hedonism. I have liked his other books in the past (Skinny Legs and All is one of my all-time favorites) but this one didn't have enough insight to adequately place the elements of the story within a greater understanding of the world around us (usually one the greatest things about his writing.)

This contents of this book have much in common with the house of the title when originally found - the structure is there but it is empty. There are no great characters in this book which makes it easy to put down.
As with others I eagerly awaited the release of this book after enjoying his last book "Fierce Invalids ...". Unfortunately I was left very disappointed. For those new to Robbins do not read this first you will miss out on some very fine novels - just go back in time.

SPOILERS FOLLOW. DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU DON'T WANT THEM.

All right, so, let's flash back to eighth grade English class. In that class, we learned a few things about stories: a story has a protagonist (a main character) and an antagonist (something the protagonist is struggling against, whether that be a "bad guy," a circumstance, his own mind, whatever). The struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist is known as "conflict." The conflict builds and escalates until it reaches a "climax" where it is resolved. After that, there is often a brief "denouement" where the author winds down the story.

Does every story have to follow this formula? No, of course not. But the majority of great stories do.

Villa Incognito completely ignores these concepts and just blathers. Is there a protagonist? Not really - for a while, it seems like it's going to be Tanuki, and then it seems like it's going to be Dickie, and then it seems like it's going to be Lisa Ko, but then we realize that there's no character driving the plot forward. There's no focal point to this story; it just wanders almost randomly from character to character.

Is there an antagonist? Not really. We've got Mayflower Fitzgerald, who's more-or-less unlikeable, but he's not really in conflict with any of the protagonist candidates. I guess if you read between the lines, you could identify the antagonist as "uptight conservative Christian values," but even though Robbins finds a dozen ways to say "uptight conservative Christian values suck," none of them actually appear in the story, making them a particularly ineffectual antagonist.

Is there any conflict? I couldn't find one. When Lisa's tanukis escaped, I thought we might be looking at a conflict, but she quickly decided she didn't mind. I suppose the overarching conflict is supposed to be Dern's arrest, but it's about the weakest conflict I've ever seen. It causes no real problems for anyone. The U.S. government frets that it would put them in a bind to have to arrest "war heroes," but that never happens, and eventually it's resolved when Dern basically walks away and no one cares.

Is there a climax? Nope. The scene where Stubblefield falls off the rope seems to be masquerading as a climax, but nothing really leads to it, and when it happens, it affects nothing about the plot, and no one (including the reader) seems to care. Not to mention that Robbins basically tells us that Stubblefield probably survived, so it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

All in all, this is not a story with a beginning, a middle, or an end. It's more like a bedtime story that a very stoned hippie would tell to his kid, just wandering from weird topic to weird topic until the kid falls asleep.

But even all this could be forgiven if Robbins didn't seem so damn angry and bitter in this one. The tone in many of his earlier works was decidedly positive, mystical, even transcendent: the message was sort of "There are marvelous things in life, and if you shed some of your hangups, you might see them." The tone of this one is just, well, angry and bitter. The message seems to be "The man's always keeping us down, but the man is an idiot." Of course, "the man" doesn't really make an appearance in the book, except maybe in the very brief, two-page appearance of the soldiers who Christened Dern and Stubblefield's plane "Smarty Pants."

Early Robbins works, like Skinny Legs and All, felt like Robbins was trying to open our eyes to a magical world lurking just beneath the skin of this one. Villa Incognito feels like Robbins is shaking his cane at us and telling us that anyone who's an uptight square needs to get off his damn lawn.

After reading Skinny Legs and All, and loving every word, I bought this book on tape. Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed with it and stopped listening after the first CD. How many times do we need to hear about an extra large scrotum? It must be repeated a hundred times, and it just wasn't amusing. The reader, Barrett Whitener, tries to do the best he can, but his poorly contrived Japanese accent (which sounds more like a German accent), just doesn't cut it. I'm sure if I gave it another 3 or 4 hours of listening, I might get hooked, but who has that kind of time to gamble???

A good novel by Mr. Robbins -- definitely not one of his best (i.e. Jitterbug Perfume, Skinny Legs and All, Fierce Invalids in Hot Climates); but certainly better than the disappointing Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Definitely lacking the twisty, understories and linquistic acrobatics of his better books, but interesting and still enlightening.

I think Tom needed money when he cranked this baby out. He doesn't really get you attached to any of the characters. If you are catching an airplane to japan its better then most of the stuff out there. But not his best work, not even close really.

I thought I was cruising for a disappointing Tom Robbins book until I got to the last quarter of it. Read for symbolism in this one. The tightrope and the circus... I won't say anymore so as not to ruin it. And to some of these the store critics: give the guy a break, for chrissakes. He writes each book the way he feels like it. If you've learned anything from reading Tom Robbins, it ought to have been non-attachment to your own expections.

Let me get this straight... this guy has a fanatical cultlike following of readers? Writing this crap? Sixty pages in and I don't care what happens to anybody in this book. The next time I want witty and wacky, I'm going to reread some Douglas Adams.

Hmmmmmm, Vietnam, drug addled depraved-yet-cool-and-intellectual hedonists bucking Capitalist War Mongering America, Asian hookers with hearts of gold..............have I been here before?

Man, how bored am I of the western white middle aged male's fascination with these themes, and the subsequent romanticising thereof of such themes. America is bad, that's original. Women are either unattractive morons or tasty sex hungry girls. Foriegn cultures are fodder for either ignorant patronizing riffings or as contrast to the Great Evil of the Western world, whatever is handy at the moment. Hedonism is the answer, man, don't be so uptight! [...]

I usually would concede that at least the mythical Japanese badger with huge [...] was funny and original, if Robbin's style was original, which, being in fact a complete rip-off of Kurt Vonnegut in every way, is not. The difference being that unlike Robbins, who I imagine writing with a dictionary by his side to construct his really "cool" lines, Vonnegut's writing shines with the exact elements Robbin's lacks: soul and moral authority.