Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #126030 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 386 pages

Synopsis
When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you - an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker - are convinced you're facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses. Over these fateful three days, you will be forced to confront everything from mysterious African rituals to legendary amphibians, from tarot-card bombshells to street violence, from your own sexuality to outer space. This is, after all, a Tom Robbins novel - and the author has never been in finer form.

Customer Reviews

Wuf! So long, and thanks for all the frogs
This book is classic Tom Robbins in the sense that almost every page has some hilariously humorous play on words, or unreal observation about real events, including a lot of incisive commentary on the subject of Washington's allegedly wooden teeth. (I kept wondering if he got knot holes instead of cavities, and whether he used Terminix for dental services*)

That said, this is not one of his best books by a long shot. It starts slowly, works up to a purple passion and then lands flat on its squatty Buddha-esque rear end. The tortuous tale twists around a feckless female Filipino stock broker, facing the fall of the fickle stock market over the Good Friday weekend, frantically forming far-fetched formulae to foil her forthcoming firing. Her acquaintances include a traditionally built psychic, whose fall-back occupation is watching home movies of the lonely and attention-deficient, a philanthropic Lutheran real estate broker who desperately wants to marry her, and last of all, a born again Barbary ape with a yen for banana popsicles and larceny.

While living through the worst days of her lives, she meets a tattooed ex-broker recently back from Timbuktu, and tracks him to his den of decadence beneath a bowling alley. Through this earth shaking incident, not all of which could be blamed on the rise and fall of the bowling pins, she has an Alice in Wonderland experience involving a distant planet, a toothy Japanese doctor who is said to have found a cure for cancer, an inscrutable Indian and a whole lot of amphibians.

Highly pseudo-philosophic, with unlikeable characters and flimsy plot, the main thing this has going for it is the dry humor of the word play, and all the rain in Seattle can't wash that away.


Amanda Richards


*Not a Tom Robbins quote, but it might have been if I didn't write it first

wierd and wonderful
Great characters and intriguing ideas, wild cultural differences, the mysteries of Tarot, frog pajamas.... what more do you want? Easy to read (despite the "you" form) and amusing, with deeper ideas below the surface. If you want something a bit different, this could be for you.

Not Tom Robbins' best
Not Tom Robbins' best. This is written irritatingly in the second person "you". It features a cast of unsympathetic characters - a female stockbroker worrying about a market crash, her born-again boyfriend pursuing a lost monkey, a psychic who disappears and a former stockbroker who's just returned from a trip to Timbuktoo. Add it all together and this does not a great novel make. By the time you get to the end you have ceased to care what happens.