Having not seen the film of this book, I picked it up on a whim (and the appealing design of the Bloomsbury classics cover). I'm very glad I did.

The descriptive prose flows wonderfully from page to page, with the murders themselves being almost a side note to the beauty and grotesque of the aromas. A comparison could be drawn to American Psycho, especially in terms of entering the main characters head, but without so many shock tactics.

If you read it as a standard crime novel, you'll be disappointed. However, the unusual manner in which the times are described, together with the variety of details that are touched upon provide an engaging read more akin to the classical fairy tales. The end of the book is not as tight as the beginning, but this does not particularily detract.

Certainly twisted, but overlaid with beauty and and the twists and turns of perspective. ( )

Fascinating allegory ( )

It's hard to decide whether this book is just famous for being famous, or whether there's really something there apart from 18th century costume-drama, gratuitous slaughter of virgins and a lot of lyrical description.

The basic idea is a magic-realist conceit that makes scent into the essential external projection of our humanity: Süskind's central character, Grenouille, has no human social attributes at all (he sees other people only as an inconvenience, or occasionally as a resource to be exploited) and therefore no scent, but he learns to synthesize, and later to steal, scents that can make other people relate to him as a person.

All very clever, no doubt, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove. Grenouille, a stunted, deformed and not very intelligent bastard born under a fish-stall, is obviously intended at least in part as a grotesque parody of the Nietzschean Übermensch, a being who has risen above the delusions of morality and religion. And presumably the 18th century setting is supposed to bring in associations with the Marquis de Sade; we certainly get a lot of hints of the approaching death and destruction of the French revolution.

This has obviously been an enormously successful book, possibly simply because it was made into an American film (which I haven't seen). Without knowing of that success, I would have guessed that it's far too lyrically self-indulgent to succeed as a literary novel, and too lacking in sympathetic characters (or characters of any sort, really) to be enjoyable as a historical novel or a crime story. But maybe there is something to it, after all? ( )

Fascinating story up until the farcical ending. Enjoyed the writing style but just a bit lurid for my taste. ( )

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has no scent of his own but a very keen sense of smell, which he uses to map out his surroundings and make sense of his world. Obsessed with possessing and creating the perfect scent, Grenouille will stop at nothing. The subtitle is “The Story of a Murderer,” but this book is really about much more than that. The writing is wonderful, the story is strange and at times absurd, and the end is just straight up weird. It’s really like nothing else I’ve read. Perfume is a dark, somewhat grotesque, and utterly unique read that will appeal to fans of Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle. ( )