Marcel (!) LeFever makes the point that familiar smells seem to bring back memories more effectively than, say, photographs or tape- recordings, and then goes on to suggest that, "Fragrance is a conduit for our earliest memories, on the one hand on the other, it may accompany us as we enter the next life.
What do perfume and immortality have to do with each other? They are both related to memory.
This seems reasonable, although their secret of immortality does not: shallow breathing hot baths meager diet and daily sex. The Alobar and Kudra story is the living heart of this book somehow these two seem to have solved the problem that exercised Robbins in his last book, Still Life With Woodpecker: "Who knows how to make love stay?" Alobar and Kudra stay in love century after century - how? By working together, being faithful to each other, and making love. And most important of all, there are Alobar and Kudra, immortal lovers who trek from medieval Bohemia to present-day Paris by way of a Tibetan lamasery, the Bandaloop caves in India, Byzantine Constantinople, Pan's Greece, frontier America, and the afterworld. Back in Seattle, there is Wiggs Dannyboy, a Timothy Leary work-alike who's given up acid for immortality research. In Paris there are the LeFever brothers of LeFever Fragrances - out of respect for the noble whale's ambergris, Marcel LeFever spends much of his time wearing a whale-mask.
In New Orleans, we have Madame Devalier and V'lu, sometime potion-merchants now in search for the same jasmine-based scent as Priscilla is. There is Priscilla in Seattle, a "genius waitress" who spends her off hours trying to invent the ultimate perfume. Jitterbug Perfume has a large and exotic cast of characters, all of whom are interested in immortality and/or perfume. "We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washroom and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss." Tom Robbins is worried about getting old.
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