The book jacket blurb on my copy says:

Jitterbug Perfume is an epic, which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn’t conclude until nine o’clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.

This is the second of Robbin’s novel that I’ve read after Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Reading Robbins seems to invoke strangers to talk about him to you. When I purchased this book at Dog Eared, the three men working the register took an immediate interest in sharing their thoughts of Robbins. They all liked JitterBug Perfume, they were split on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and the rest of it is junk. One night, after I left this book behind in a bar, the bartender working when I picked it up professed to me that Jitterbug Perfume was his favorite book of all time. Finally, one night in the office, I came back to a handwritten note from someone who saw Jitterbug Perfume on my desk:

Jtterbug Perfume is filled with charmingly whimsical quotes (I share a few below). He has some of the style of Vonnegut but, as far as I can tell, none of the politics. Robbin’s anarchist agenda is undermined by his slant of libertarian hedonism that largely depends on the casual, masculine consumption of drugs, alcohol, and women.

I didn’t really like it.

Quotes

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin’ on himself and start payin’ attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained?…how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?…If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire…why not get better at fulfilling desire? I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to achieve the grand prize - they safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie, and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky file z’herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po’ boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week–yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don’t eat day and night, if you don’t constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town. In fact, like any sex offender, it can leave permanent psychological scars.

Madame Lily Devalier always asked “Where are you?” in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within.

“There are no such things as synonyms!” he practically shouted. “Deluge is not the same as flood.”

Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun.

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.”

The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.