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Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas

by Tom Robbins

Our price: LBP 3,000Unavailable

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Overview
Readers reviews (5)

Product Details

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group (P)
Publishing date: 06/2000
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9780553840032
ISBN: 0553840037

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 yourlife 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.

"If reality is starting to feel a little too much like a Tom Robbins novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas is a good source of inspiration to start making some sense of it."
THE HOUSTON POST

"A whirlwind of mad incidents . . . and an endless supply of great lines . . . a very funny book that might incite a bit of thinking as well as laughter."
LIBRARY JOURNAL

"Once again, Tom Robbins has proved he is the emperor of description, the master of metaphor, the sultan of simile -- the man is like Jackson Pollock with a word processor."
SAN ANTONIO CURRENT

"Turn off the television, unplug the telephone, curl up in bed (with or without pajamas), and consider this book an interactive experience that requires neither a CD-ROM nor a modem."
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (RATING: A)

"For people who enjoyed the decade of greed, this is a quite subversive book."
THE SUNDAY ADVOCATE, BATON ROUGE

"It's hard not to fall under Robbins' seductive spell."
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES

"Like good Psilocybin, Robbins shows us things that we would not otherwise see, and after the light of his particular vision has shone upon an object, we will never see it again in quite the same way."
THE PARK CITY (UTAH) RECORD

"More than mere entertainment . . . Frog hops over its bright and clever zaniness to plop us into a shadowy plot rippling with caution and prophecy."
THE OREGONIAN

"Frog Pajamas is . . . a ribbeting read."
FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

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If you're a Tom Robbins fan,
From Amazon

this book will not dissappoint. It's even worth reading twice just to savor his metaphors!

for space aliens on vacation in Seattle
From Amazon

Though I wouldn't necessarily say that this was my favorite Tom Robbins read, I keep returning to it. There is something very charming about the prose, something very sucker-punch about our naive protagonist, something very engaging about the very short time-frame over which the tale plays out. It's a fun read and typical of Robbins in as much as he's trying to turn some taken-for-granted beliefs and turn them upside down; but this one is more environmental than it is religious or spiritual in its ... well, in its nature.

amazing author still enjoyable!
From Amazon

While I have always enjoyed this author, I had not had the chance to read this one... It does not dissapoint! A great relaxing escape for your free time! An excellent imaginitive endeavor... Well worth the cash...

"Disaster's always best when it's on a grand scale."
From Amazon

... and the scale certainly is grand in Tom Robbins' rollicking riot of a novel. It opens with the beginning of a disastrous three-day weekend for one Gwendolyn Mati, a lovingly unlikable stockbroker whose ambitions are sky high and whose perceptions seem hopelessly shallow. It is the night before Good Friday and there has been a disastrous plunge in the stock market that has the whole economy screaming disaster, and Gwen finds herself facing termination on Monday morning thanks to some shady ethics she exercised in her client's portfolios that have been brought to light by the crash. Her once-promising boyfriend, Belford, is annoying her to no end after developing an unhealthy dose of Christian guilt that is compelling him to leave his promising real estate career for (gasp!) social work. Gwen desperately needs to find a way to keep her job before Monday morning, but she can't seem to get a seemingly sleazy former stockbroker named Larry Diamond off her mind. And things only get worse the following day, when Belford's born-again pet monkey escapes and Gwen's best friend, a 300 pound psychic named Q-Jo, vanishes. All this happens in the first hundred pages of "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas," and the Robbins roller coaster has only just begun. There's still a curious cancer treatment, a bunch of overly rich and rowdy teenagers, celestial interference, a sex offender, disappearing frogs, a transfixing Van Gogh sketch, aliens, and more to come.

"Half Asleep" is at its riotous best in its first half, when Robbins gives free reign to his limitless imagination, and the result is a philosophical-comedy mind-warp that could give Vonnegut's masterful Breakfast of Champions a run for its money ... until the second half of the novel devolves into a talky jumble of rambling philosophical dialogue that does more to annoy the reader than to enlighten him. I like what Robbins is saying underneath it all (that we need to chill out, think about how we define our lives, and focus on what really matters instead of allowing money and ambition steer us off course), but he weakens his argument by muddling it with random references to alien mushroom spores, enemas, et al. His specious asides confound more than anything else, and make you long for the carefree opening salvo that had said so much more without trying nearly as hard. The ending is also truly disappointing because it is all too sudden and leaves you with too many questions.

This was my first Robbins novel, and despite its flaws I did enjoy it. I am particularly impressed by his unique descriptive style: instead of telling us that someone has the chills he writes that "ice cubes clink against the swizzle stick of your spine." Nice touch, Mr. Robbins. I look forward to exploring the rest of his canon in the future. I just hope that there's more madcap glee than abstruse philosophy.

Grade: B-

Wuf! So long, and thanks for all the frogs
From Amazon

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, May 26, 2007

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