Plot Introduction
Invalids ... follows Switters, our wheelchair-using protagonist, across four continents, in and out of love and danger. Through Switters, Robbins "explores, challenges, mocks, and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era." (Quote from the hardcover book jacket.)
Robbins has stated in numerous interviews that in this book he was trying to deal with contradiction. But rather than eschewing his contradictory nature, as is typical Western practice, Switters embraces it. He's a CIA agent who hates the government. He's a pacifist who carries a gun. He's as much in love with his seventeen-year-old stepsister as he is with a forty-six-year-old nun. Switters feels that the core of the universe, the heart of existence, is light and dark existing together. One is not separate from the other, they just exist. This is the core of "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates", along with an interest in the Lady of Fatima and a squawking parrot. The title of the novel comes from Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, in which he daydreams about becoming one of "... ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds."
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