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Villa Incognito

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Villa Incognito

By: Tom Robbins
Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
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About this listen

 Imagine that there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War.

Imagine that there is a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women have shared a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore.

Imagine just those things (don’t even try to imagine the love story) and you’ll have a foretaste of Tom Robbins’s eighth and perhaps most beautifully crafted novel--a work as timeless as myth yet as topical as the latest international threat.

On one level, this is a book about identity, masquerade and disguise--about “the false mustache of the world”--but neither the mists of Laos nor the smog of Bangkok, neither the overcast of Seattle nor the fog of San Francisco, neither the murk of the intelligence community nor the mummery of the circus can obscure the linguistic phosphor that illuminates the pages of Villa Incognito.

A female fan once wrote to Tom Robbins:
“Your books make me think, they make me laugh, they make me horny and they make me aware of the wonder of everything in life.”

Villa Incognito will surely arouse a similar response in many readers, for in its lusty, amusing way it both celebrates existence and challenges our ideas about it.

To say much more about a novel as fresh and surprising as Villa Incognito would run the risk of diluting the sheer fun of reading it. As his dedicated readers worldwide know full well, it’s best to climb aboard the Tom Robbins tilt-a-whirl, kiss preconceptions and sacred cows goodbye and simply enjoy the ride.©2003 Tom Robbins; (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Magical Realism War & Military
All stars
Most relevant
A bit long and drawn out in places but funny and profound in many others.

Entertaining

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The book is a very strange mix of ideas about American society versus other ways of doing things, stereotyping Thailand as a sex tourism destination, cringy sex scenes that have little consequence in the narrative, and dialogues that don't end up anywhere. I was very surprised when the epilogue started, I thought I was in the middle of the book whose point I still had not gotten up to then. Entertaining? somewhat. Cringy? Very. Good literature? scarcely. Performance? great, but then again, I have not been to SE Asia, so I'm not the best judge.

underwhelming and skerchy story

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