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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick…
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (original 1985; edition 2001)

by Patrick Süskind (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
18,063446271 (3.95)1 / 456
Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet there is one odor he cannot capture.… (more)
Member:Kaluana_
Title:Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Authors:Patrick Süskind (Author)
Info:Vintage (2001), Edition: Reprint, 255 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
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Work Information

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind (1985)

  1. 162
    The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (spiphany)
  2. 73
    Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (klerulo)
    klerulo: Both these works attempt to get inside the head of singularly amoral sociopathic murderers.
  3. 40
    The Bells by Richard Harvell (SimoneA)
    SimoneA: Where Perfume is about a boy who has an extraordinary sense of smell, The Bells is about a boy who has extraordinary hearing. The vivid description of sounds in The Bells remind me of the description of scents in Perfume.
  4. 20
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    Zeroville by Steve Erickson (VisibleGhost)
    VisibleGhost: An obsession with movies instead of scent.
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    The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (Rosey_Kim)
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1980s (22)
Europe (163)
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» See also 456 mentions

English (331)  Spanish (46)  French (14)  Dutch (13)  Italian (12)  German (10)  Swedish (6)  Portuguese (Portugal) (4)  Portuguese (Brazil) (3)  Norwegian (2)  Danish (1)  Hebrew (1)  Greek (1)  All languages (444)
Showing 1-5 of 331 (next | show all)
Beautiful writing, a book filled with scents and absurdity. Perfume was recommended to me by my literature professor and I enjoyed the hell out of this book. From beginning to end the book gripped my attention. Definitely recommend. ( )
  Tyler_DDurden | Mar 26, 2024 |
Fascinating but unpleasant. It's unusual to have a book in which the protagonist is a thoroughly unlikeable villain with no redeeming qualities. ( )
  davidrgrigg | Mar 23, 2024 |
Our sense of smell and how it can trigger emotional feelings and memories is used in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind as we read about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell but without a personal scent of his own. This young orphan exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath as he has no sense of empathy toward people or animals and only cares about how he can use them to his advantage.

After a very difficult young life, he is able to talk his way into becoming apprenticed to one of Paris’ successful perfumers but in his search for new smells he encounters a young girl with a wondrous personal scent. He murders her simply to have access to that scent. Eventually he leaves Paris in an attempt to learn new techniques so that he can preserve an even wider range of odors. Although he becomes increasingly disgusted with people and spends some time living as a hermit, he soon heads to the south of France and works for a perfumer there. He also finds another young girl whose scent makes him believe that he can develop a perfume that would hypnotize people into thinking the wearer is god-like. In his quest for developing this perfume he murders more young women in order to use their body parts to evolve the fragrance that he is working on.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a gruesome, fantasy tale in which the author blends both factual information and fairy-tale story telling about a murderer and his obsessive quest for a perfect perfume. I found the information and facts about the manufacture of perfume to be very interesting but, this was a difficult book to enjoy due to it’s dark themes. However, the author gives us well written prose that elevates the story and makes us ponder upon the importance of fragrance. ( )
  DeltaQueen50 | Mar 22, 2024 |
I liked the first 100 or so pages, basically up until he fucks off into the mountains, then it turned dull. I also found the writing style overly wordy while not actually saying anything or moving the plot forward. ( )
  LynnMPK | Feb 3, 2024 |
I'm not even done and I have to say that I am not sure why this get's so much acclaim its very over done in places missing color in others, and full of entirely non pertinent moments. Then we get to the fact that the main character is a mentally disabled person essentially and the entire novel villainizes this character. Villainizes him long before any reason to. Why this has the critical acclaim that it does is beyond me. I wish I had my time back. ( )
2 vote Blanket_Dragon | Jan 23, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 331 (next | show all)
35 livres cultes à lire au moins une fois dans sa vie
Quels sont les romans qu'il faut avoir lu absolument ? Un livre culte qui transcende, fait réfléchir, frissonner, rire ou pleurer… La littérature est indéniablement créatrice d’émotions. Si vous êtes adeptes des classiques, ces titres devraient vous plaire.
De temps en temps, il n'y a vraiment rien de mieux que de se poser devant un bon bouquin, et d'oublier un instant le monde réel. Mais si vous êtes une grosse lectrice ou un gros lecteur, et que vous avez épuisé le stock de votre bibliothèque personnelle, laissez-vous tenter par ces quelques classiques de la littérature.
 
1986
Patrick Süskind
Le parfum
traduit de l'allemand par B. Lortholary, Fayard
«Süskind a conçu une magnifique histoire où même la mort et l'assassinat sont teintés de poésie.» (Lire, avril 1986)
 
"From start to finish, Perfume is a ridiculously improbable piece of verbose claptrap which the author himself evidently found impossible to take seriously for very long at a time....Since very little happens within Grenouille's mind, and he achieves with other characters no relations capable of development, the book requires a good deal of stuffing to achieve the dimensions of a small novel. The best of this material is several different listings of the materials and procedures involved in perfume making. Suskind has done his homework on the topic....The writing of the book is verbose and theatrical."
added by Nickelini | editNew York Review of Books, Robert M. Adams (pay site) (Nov 1, 1986)
 
Just as Grenouille can manufacture a perfume that infallibly conjures up the same response in anyone who senses it, so Mr. Suskind creates words that provide a satisfying illusion of another time. Grenouille the perfumer becomes a kind of novelist, creating phantom objects in the air, but Mr. Suskind himself is a perfumer of language. This is a remarkable debut.
 
A delight to the senses, disturbing serial killer, must read!
 

» Add other authors (92 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Süskind, Patrickprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Agabio, GiovannaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Łukasiewicz, MałgorzataTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Barratt, SeanNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Craft, KinukoCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Duran, TevfikTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Farkas, TündeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Flávio R. KotheTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Gerulaitienė, VilijaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Gorina, Pilar GiraltTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Αγγελίδου, ΜαρίαTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Jonkers, RonaldTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Korte, HansNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lortholary, BernardTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Malisch, BarbaraProduzentsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mannila, MarkkuTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Moura, Maria Emilia FerrosTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Paravić, NedeljkaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Rønnow, TomTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Simova, YuriaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tomanová, JitkaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Van der Veken, JanCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
VengerovaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vilar, JudithTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wallenström, UlrikaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Watteau, AntoineCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Woods, John E.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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In eighteenth century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.
Quotations
Hij sloot zijn ogen en concentreerde zich op de geuren die hem vanuit het gebouw aan de andere kant toewaaiden. Daar waren de geuren van de vaten, azijn en wijn en de honderdvoudige zware geuren uit het magazijn, en de geur van de rijkdom die als fijn gouden zweet uit de muren transpireerde en tenslotte de geuren uit de tuin die aan de achterkant van het huis moest liggen. Het was niet makkelijk deze tere geurtoetsen uit de tuin op te vangen, want ze trokken slechts in smalle linten over de gevel van het huis heen omlaag door de straat. Grenouille onderscheidde magnolia's, hyacinten, peperboompjes en rododendron.. - maar er leek nog iets anders te zijn, iets moorddadigs lekkers, dat in deze tuin geurde, een geur zo exquis als hij in zijn leven nog niet - of toch, maar dan maar één keer - in zijn neus had gehad...Hij moest dichter bij deze geur komen.
“Never before in his life had he known what happiness was. He knew at most some very rare states of numbed contentment. But now he was quivering with happiness and could not sleep for pure bliss. It was as if he had been born a second time; no, not a second time, the first time, for until now he had merely existed like an animal with a most nebulous self-awareness. but after today, he felt as if he finally knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius... He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted abominations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the chaotic vortex of their souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him... He must become a creator of scents... the greatest perfumer of all time.”
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Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet there is one odor he cannot capture.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary
smell everything /
got lost in a world of greed /
devoured at market 
(aychan)
basic boy meets girl/
boy's fine nose loves girl's fine scent/
boy wants girl pomade
(hauntedpuppydome)

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Folio Archives 327: Perfume by Patrick Süskind 2008 in Folio Society Devotees

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Penguin Australia

4 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.

Editions: 0140120831, 0141037504, 0141041153, 0734306768

 

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