Still Life with Woodpecker

Americans can be crazy, but at their best they have an outrageous, defiant Bugs-Bunny-esque candor and optimism I admire as a foreigner. This is an extremely silly book about a deposed princess in Seattle who falls in love with an outlaw arsonist, symbolized by a pack of cigarettes and pyramids, possibly or possibly not inspired by an ancient alien race of red-heads. Add in the narrator continually complaining about his typewriter. None of this chaos and randomness makes much sense when I describe it, but imagine a warmer, happier version of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Sign me up… show more.

This is the Tom Robbins book for me: the glorious bastard that made me want to be a writer.

It's a day lost in Tijuana, or Nice, or Beijing, or some other place you'd never thought you'd be, and you don't speak the language, but you've convinced yourself that you're fluent, and you can do it: you can get around anyway, and there's no cabs, and so you get into some guy's really old Volvo or, more ill-advised, van, and you give him the local equivalent of ten bucks to take you where you hope you want to be and… show more.

I like the sheer disregard that Tom Robbins shows for traditional ways to tell a story. This one is about a romance that takes place in a package of cigarettes and it runs through a smorgasbord of strange characters and unlikely situations that pretty much sum up the hopelessness of a world too complex and out of control to understand.

I particularly like the casual tone of the storyteller and this is something I strive for in my own writing.

Still Life with Woodpecker tells the story of the love affair between Leigh-Cheri, an environmentalist princess, and Bernard Mickey Wrangle, an outlaw known as the Woodpecker. It’s a pure tribute to love and the enthusiasm for life and endeavors to emphasize the unreserved need we have to have in order to keep both of these alive.

Bernard reminds Leigh-Cheri that “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and… show more.