Jitterbug Perfume has a large and exotic cast of characters, all of whom are interested in immortality and/or perfume. There is Priscilla in Seattle, a "genius waitress" who spends her off hours trying to invent the ultimate perfume. 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. In Paris there are the LeFever brothers of LeFever Fragrances…. Back in Seattle, there is Wiggs Dannyboy, a Timothy Leary work-alike who's given up acid for immortality research. 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 after-world.
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. (pp. 1, 9)
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