Revolutionary...

The following review is reprinted from Modern Hippie Mag.

In his debut novel Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito recounted the end of the world. In his latest book Nine Kinds of Naked, he celebrates a new beginning. A day-glow orange frisbee comes whizzing out of the eye of the storm, which serves as the catalyst to bring a collection of oddball and enchanting characters together in this exploration of chaos and synchronicity. Writing like the illegitimate nephew of Tom Robbins, Vigorito brings his own playful sense of wordsmithmanship to this work of philosophical fiction that, while delivered in a quickly paced, frolicking adventure in fundamental lunacy, simultaneously offers a message of revolutionary proportions.

The book revolves, if you will, around a stationary hurricane, or a hypercane, just off the coast of New Orleans. The book, however, is nowhere near stationary. Jumping back and forth through time, Vigorito paints a portrait of the intersecting lives of the main characters and the little impulses of action that create such astounding effects on one another. Though the book does jump and weave from moment to moment and decade to decade, its proclamation of time as illusory and the present moment as the only true reality affords the reader a keen sense of flow as the stories begin to interrelate.

Ultimately, the book is about synchronicity. It is about how all of life is designed and connected and interdependent. It is about how synchronicity is everywhere, and how we as humans, caught up in our totalitarian society of control, merely miss out on the divine nature of creation with our constant grasping at what we can never truly attain, the control we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we actually have. The only true control we have is to listen to and act upon our impulses, thereby attuning ourselves to the synchronistic flow. For it is not only our prerogative to take part in synchronicity for our own sake as the universe reveals itself to us, but also to act upon it so that the universe will reveal itself to others.

The title stems from the idea that nine is the ultimate number, the triple trinity, and the end of the line in single digits. To be Nine Kinds of Naked means to be stripped of all pretenses and open to vulnerability. In certain religious sects, it may be known as ‘dying to oneself.’

Though the book may be a bit racy at times for the pew puckering patooties that pray for the planet to praise the All Powerful Patriarch, Vigorito offers up some of the best arguments for Intelligent Design theory to come along in ages. Cloaked in the veil of Chaos Theory, the concept of synchronicity and the ideas such as the Golden Spiral and connectivity of the collective unconscious allow the reader great insights into the mysteries of the cosmos and the beauty of living in love. And for the readers who will open themselves up to it, as they read the book and meditate upon synchronicity, it will truly jump off of the page and become more apparent in their lives.

Nine Kinds of Naked is a wonderful dance, a literary jitterbug that’s a lot of fun, a little bit impish, extremely insightful, and guaranteed to be read at just the right time… the eternal Now.