By Hillel Italy | Associated Press
New York – Tom Robbins, the novelist and the Philosopher -Philosopher pranks who have charmed and adding millions of readers with adventures with screws such as “even the cowgirls obtain the blues” and the “jitterbug perfume”, has died. He was 92 years old.
The death of Robbins was confirmed by his friend, the director of the Craig Popelars edition, who said that the author died on Sunday morning.
Donating the blessed with “Crazy Wisdom”, Robbins published eight novels and the memory “Tibetan Peach Pie” and affectionately examined his world of absurdity without dead end, commentary of author and script Zig Zag. No one had a more wild imagination, whether it was a capricious heroine with thumbs lying in “cowgirls” or to land it the corpse of Jesus in a makeshift zoo in “another attraction by the road” . And no one told more jokes about himself: Robbins once described his light and Scratchy Drawl as “as if she had been stretched through the underwear of Davy Crockett”.
He could understand almost anything but growing up. People Magazine would label Robbins “The Vidernial Flower Child and Wild Blooming Peter Pan of American Letters”, which “plunges the mats of history in strange ink and flared up its graffiti on the face of modern fiction”.
Originally from Blowing Rock, North Carolina, who moved to Virginia and was named “the most playful boy” by his high school, Robbins could match any story in his books with a life. It was time for him to see a proctologist and presented himself with a duck mask. (Doctor and Robbins have become friends). He liked to recall the food server in Texas who unbuttoned his top and revealed a faded autograph, his autograph.
Or this strange moment in the 1990s, when the FBI required clues to the identity of the unabomber by reading Robbins’ novel “Still Life with Woodpecker”. Robbins would allege that two federal agents, both attractive women, were sent for the interviewer.
“The FBI is not stupid!” He liked to say. “They knew my weakness!”
He also managed to meet some celebrities, thanks in part to the cinematic adaptation of “even the cowgirls”, which featured Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves, and to appearances in films such as “Breakfast of Champions” and ” Mrs. Parker and the vicious circle. He wrote from the date of Debra Winger to the prize ceremony of the 1991 Academy and to kill himself almost in an after -part of the Oscars when – hoping to impress Al Pacino – he swallowed a glass of cologne. He had happier memories of recording in a hotel and being recognized by a young, pretty clerk, who delighted his work and ignored the man standing next to him, Neil Young.
In the novels of Robbins, the quest was everything and he helped capture the open -open mind of the 1960s in part because he knew life so well. He dropped acid, hitchhiked from one ocean to the other, traveled from Tanzania to Himalayas and continued with friends and foreigners in a way he n ‘had no right to survive. He was not based on current references to Mark Time, but on understanding the era of the interior.
“Faulkner had his Gothic Freak show from the South of Southern, his battlefields and his European cafes, Melville, his New England with his big ships,” he wrote in his memoirs, published in 2014. ” I had finally reached it, a cultural phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon like the world had not been seen before, has not seen since a psychic upheaval, a change in paradigm, a Widespread egalitarian jump if it is ultimately unbearable in consciousness.
His path to fictional writing had its own disjointed hallucinatory quality. He was a dropout from the University of Washington and Lee (Tom Wolfe was a classmate) who joined the Air Force because he did not know what else to do. He moved to the northwest Pacific in the early 1960s and was somehow assigned to review an opera for the Seattle Times, becoming the first classical music critic to compare Rossini to Robert Mitchum. Robbins would soon find himself in a wacky meeting with the conductor Milton Katims, making a conversation by claiming that he was working on his own booklet, “The Gitan of Issaquah”, named after a suburbs of Seattle.
“You must admit that he had an opera ring,” insisted Robbins.
In the late 1960s, the publishers heard about his antics and thought he could have a book in him. A doubleday publisher met Robbins and agreed to pay $ 2,500 for “another attraction by the road”. Published in 1971, Robbins’ first novel sold little linen despite the praise of Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others, but has become a success in the pocket book. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” was released in 1976 and finally sold more than a million copies.
“Read solemnly, with expectations of conventional coherence,” even the cowgirls get the blues “will disappoint,” wrote Thomas Leclair in the New York Times. “Having entered like a garage sale, pressed and picked up,” Cowgirls “is entertaining and, like the corrugated mirror by the lawn mower, often instructive. Tom Robbins is one of our best practitioners of great madness. »»
Domestic stability was another prolonged adventure; An ex-girlfriend complained “The problem with you, Tom is that you have too much fun.” He was married and divorced twice, and had three children, before setting up with his third wife, Alexa d’Avalon, who appeared in the cinematographic version of “Even the cowgirls get the blues”.
The other Robbins’ books included “half asleep in the frog pajamas”, “Fierce Invalids at the Maison des Climats Hot”, “Villa incognito”. Its honors included the Bumbershoot Golden Umbrlla Award for Lifetime Achievement and the name Writer’s Digest among the 100 best authors of the 20th century. But he only cherished a letter received from an anonymous woman.
“Your books make me laugh, they make me think, they make me excited”, informed her his fan, “and they make me aware of all the wonderful people.”
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