Villa Incognito

Tom Robbins

What are we talking about when we talk about the soul? Well, pop culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. The soul doesn't hang out at a Memphis barbershop, fry catfish for supper, and keep a thirty-eight Special in its underwear drawer. Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.
On the other hand, Stubblefield continued, the soul is most definitely not some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. For all of its ectoplasmic associations, it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it to be a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They're mistaken.

It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute.

There is a difference between an author and a writer. By virtue of being published, Robbins is an author. By virtue of the first line of Villa Incognito he is both a hack and an aspiring genius. There are many moments in Villa Incognito when Robbins rouses himself to what would be great heights but he inevitably ruins these moments by letting us see how hard he is trying, and it is very hard.
There is something about all of Villa Incognito that rings sour in my ear. Like the last quote above, which is the first of the book, you always have the feeling that Robbins is trying to make up for something by giving you outrageous subject matter. The dancing bears will receive applause as long as they are mutant bears or cross-dressing bears, or have unusually large genitalia, never mind if they dance badly. Tom Robbins dances badly.