Excuse me, then, honorable animal ancestor. The World of the Animal Ancestors.' His voice could have been shoveled from a gravel pit.

Well, where did you come from, Tanuki himself?' Yet, having said all that, we must concede that the role of anatomical size per se in Tanuki's descent is not easy to determine, and a more pertinent question might be not how the badger managed to use his significant seed sack to parachute to earth but, rather: Where did he parachute from? And why?

There is also the possibility that Tanuki had (and perhaps still has) the power to increase or decrease scrotum size at will. In those days, his testicular balloon bag may actually have been even more voluminous than it is today, though that's difficult to imagine since his balls very nearly drag the ground as it is, and any increase in volume would surely have been an impediment to mobility if, indeed, not a source of some pain. Well, okay, it's still pretty ridiculous-and no less so just because in relation to his overall body mass, Tanuki's scrotum is proportionately larger than the scrota of elephants, whales, and the Jolly Green Giant. That is not so ridiculous when we take into account the unusual size of Tanuki's scrotum. It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. As his dedicated readers worldwide know full well, it’s best to climb aboard the Tom Robbins tilt-a-whirl, kiss preconceptions and sacred cows goodbye and simply enjoy the ride. To say much more about a novel as fresh and surprising as Villa Incognito would run the risk of diluting the sheer fun of reading it. Villa Incognito will surely arouse a similar response in many readers, for in its lusty, amusing way it both celebrates existence and challenges our ideas about it. “Your books make me think, they make me laugh, they make me horny and they make me aware of the wonder of everything in life.” On one level, this is a book about identity, masquerade and disguise-about “the false mustache of the world”-but neither the mists of Laos nor the smog of Bangkok, neither the overcast of Seattle nor the fog of San Francisco, neither the murk of the intelligence community nor the mummery of the circus can obscure the linguistic phosphor that illuminates the pages of Villa Incognito. Imagine just those things (don’t even try to imagine the love story) and you’ll have a foretaste of Tom Robbins’s eighth and perhaps most beautifully crafted novel-a work as timeless as myth yet as topical as the latest international threat. Imagine that there is a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women have shared a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore.

Imagine that there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War.

Villa incognito by tom robbins