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danilanglie 's review for:
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
by Tom Robbins
What a fucked up book. This novel seriously makes me so angry. The plot is so bizarre and it seems like such a fun idea at first - a curse that causes a man to live a significant portion of his life in a wheelchair and on stilts because he believes that if he touches the ground, he'll die? Crazy! A romance between an ex-CIA agent and a feminist French nun in Syria? Cool! A strange mix of love and resentment from a grandmother who demands her grandson release her pet parrot into the wilderness, but then instead Switters accidentally eats the parrot because a mystical tribal shaman serves it to him as stew? What even is happening? The writing style is superb, some of the big ideas discussed are actually insightful in a weird way, it's pretentious but in a way that's aware of its own pretentiousness, so you can almost give it a pass...
Oh yeah, and the protagonist is a pedophile and the whole book is an apologist for pedophilia. Like... why? It drives me nuts that this book was published with all of this poisonous garbage "romance" between the protagonist and his sixteen-year-old step-sister. It's not even necessary to the creative and off-the-wall plot in the rest of the story. But it's in there, and it's not a footnote. It's a deeply rooted part of Switters' character, and he has many discussions about it with other characters where the argument is basically about moral relativism and cultural differences. Barf. What the fuck. I'm never reading anything else Tom Robbins has ever written. He's a garbage person.
So... yeah. If not for this one HUGE, GLARING PROBLEM, I might give this book four whole stars. But come on, people. Can we not with the grossness here? It's completely unnecessary and harmful to boot.
Oh yeah, and the protagonist is a pedophile and the whole book is an apologist for pedophilia. Like... why? It drives me nuts that this book was published with all of this poisonous garbage "romance" between the protagonist and his sixteen-year-old step-sister. It's not even necessary to the creative and off-the-wall plot in the rest of the story. But it's in there, and it's not a footnote. It's a deeply rooted part of Switters' character, and he has many discussions about it with other characters where the argument is basically about moral relativism and cultural differences. Barf. What the fuck. I'm never reading anything else Tom Robbins has ever written. He's a garbage person.
So... yeah. If not for this one HUGE, GLARING PROBLEM, I might give this book four whole stars. But come on, people. Can we not with the grossness here? It's completely unnecessary and harmful to boot.