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    Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel
    Ebook602 pages

    Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel

    By Tom Robbins

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “As clever and witty a novel as anyone has written in a long time . . . Robbins takes readers on a wild, delightful ride. . . . A delight from beginning to end.”—Buffalo News

    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.

    Praise for Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

    “Superb.”—New York Post
     
    “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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJun 17, 2003
    ISBN9780553897906
    Unavailable
    Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel

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    Reviews for Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

    4/5

    15 ratings19 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent Book!
    • 5/5
      I LOVE THIS BOOK
    • 4/5
      I love every one of Robbins' books - each for its own unique humor and zany take on reality. Though fantastic and improbable, his stories always ring true on a certain level - mostly because they are so wonderfully charming. He makes us want to meet his goofy characters and get drunk with them.
    • 3/5
      This book was listed recently in EW as one of Johnny Dep's favorite. Dep seems the kind of fella that's off the deep end in taste so I thought I would read it and see why he liked it so much.
      It is kind if hard to appreciate a protagonist who is a pedophile and who engages in anal sex with a nun. Perhaps this gives us... insight as to Dep's relationship with Roman Polanski!
      Robbins uses wonderful flowery, flowing language, however he bleeds this over into his characters speech. Although American's can be sarcastic they are not droll and have the dry humour of the British however Switters, the CIA agent, seems to take on decidedly MI5 characteristics. Perhaps Robbins should leave the spy telling to the author that does it best, John Le Carre.
      Don't get me wrong I loved the language and I have no scruples about reading about pedophilia and anal intercourse with a nun, I just don't want my hero, flawed as he maybe, the have these faults. It makes one just a little squeamish and unable to relax enough to really enjoy Robbins wonderful language.
    • 5/5
      "Too damned vivid!" is Switters' repeated phrase through the whole book.Can you go wrong with a book in which the main character's claim to fame among his coworkers is knowing the word for female genitalia in over 70 languages?Switters begins the story as a CIA field agent, until on a mission in South America he and a British traveller meet a shaman who might be real. The shaman curses both of them, but neither really believes it, till the British guy talks Switters into a test of his, and when the British fellow dies instantly, Switters then believes the power of the shaman's curse. Switters' curse is he'll die if ever his feet touch the ground again.Returning in a wheelchair to his home in Seattle he resigns from the CIA and lives a miserable life of pity that he's confined to his wheelchair, even though he can jump up on the seat and dance...Decided to investigate the curse some more, he goes out to travel the world again, eventually discovering he can use stilts, and even one inch stilts and almost walk normal again.
    • 4/5
      A lovely interlude from reality. How could one explain the plot of this little tome -- a CIA agent goes to South America to release his grandmother's aging parrot back into the wild but ends up getting a spell cast on him by a pyramid-headed shaman that forbids him for setting foot on ground, thus confining him to a wheelchair and later stilts provided by former nuns cloistered in Syria with names such as Masked Beauty, ZuZu and Bob. Only Tom Robbins would come up with this stuff. A nice take on religion too. Not my favorite Robbins, but close to the top.
    • 4/5
      There is just never anything negative to say about Tom Robbins. He writes utterly bizarre outlandish stories but somehow they just work, he manages to make these crazy tales into things that force you to really work your mind, think, and gain new perspectives on life & the world.
    • 3/5
      I can't help thinking of Tom Robbins as a poor man's Vonnegut: much more (too) flowery writing with much less interesting ideas
    • 1/5
      I haven't been able to finish a Robbins since Still Life. But I keep trying. I begin to forget why.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite books ever. If you're not hooked after the first 5 or 10 pages, then don't bother.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed listening to this novel. I think the reader was pretty special but, that notwithstanding, I loved the way Mr. Robbins played with words and made word pictures. I even liked the jackass-ishness of the main character. His storytelling style resonated with me I guess. I was a little disappointed with the ending though; I'm not sure what I would have liked and I wasn't expecting any particular event to finish the work but I was left a little high and dry.
    • 5/5
      One of the handful of books I have read and thoroughly enjoyed more than once. Tom Robbins at his twisted finest. Art, jungle intrigue, religion, and a schooling in names for the hoo hoo; what more could one ask for in a book?
    • 1/5

      Not as fast paced and lacking some of his usual wit. I prefer his first 4 or 5 novels to this one...
    • 5/5
      By far the most delightful, unexpected, boisterous, enchanting and entertaining book I've ever read. It is wonderful and unconventionally inspirational.
    • 3/5
      Robbins can do no wrong. He is wildly entertaining, always, but especially in this.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite pieces of contemporary fiction. Robbins is hysterical.
    • 5/5
      One of Robbins' best works. Again his characters are unbelievably eccentric--a witch doctor with a pyramid shaped head. A matisse model turned nun; rogue cia agents,and let's not forget the bald parrot! Throw in a Vatican cover-up of prophesies from an apparition of the Virgin Mary and a witch doctor's curse that the protagonists feet must never touch the ground again, and you have an awfully entertaining tale with TR giving it to the Catholic church again. Robbins' analogies make me laugh out loud!
    • 4/5
      One of his funniest. although I kept wondering just how long this poor man had gone without sex when he wrote it ;~)
    • 5/5
      Robbins at his best with a look at espionage