Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

A clear sign of a really great book is when suggesting it resembles a drug deal. With other books you praise the character development, the plot, the use of language, the deeper meaning, but with something as intoxicating as the Perfume by Patrick Süskind, you're reduced to oh man, it's fu***** great, trust me, you have to try it, probably with a crazy look that would make your mother worry about the kind of things you do in your spare time.

link to full review

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 show more 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. show less

There are geniuses in our midst - painters, musicians, writers, chefs, persons who work in mediums that one can see and hear and feel and taste - mediums that last. But for author Patrick Süskind, that wasn't enough.

In 1985, Süskind published what would become his best-known work internationally: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. And while little has been seen of, or from, the author since the novel's publication (and subsequent translation from the original German, plus a feature film in 2006) one is certain that within this medium lies his greatest strength; it's a kind of magical realism that pulls on the source of endless memories, and which relentlessly binds the reader to that world.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born into show more abandonment with no scent of his own, carves his way through life in pursuit of what one can only call the scent of pure love - that essence which he has been denied since before his untimely birth. This is not simply a novel about that fifth sense to which the title alludes, but about a man for whom that sense is so keen, and whose beacon of purpose shines so brightly, that the reader cannot help but urge him on to the finale. The protagonist (though I almost hesitate to call him that) is not your average serial killer, and his story certainly borders on the unusual.

Süskind's intoxicating prose is embellishment itself - labeling each and every scent of the world as if the olfactory genius is recalling them by scientific name and spitting them out like ticker tape onto the page. This kind of barrage of words might seem affronting, but in Suskind's hand it's magical and enticing. The words race towards the climax which is nothing short of a literal orgy which Grenouille has induced.

The film adaptation (which stars Ben Whishaw, and features Alan Rickman, Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Hurd-Wood) is a visual stunner that develops some of the finer points of Grenouille's education very nicely but, without the omniscient prose of the novel, much of the richness and detail is lost in the medium translation. One countdown (Laure's approaching birthday) is replaced with another (the 13 essences) more effective device, bringing things to a conclusion more swiftly, but losing delicate layers of aromatic ambience that make the novel shine. The film is a splendid portrayal of scent as a medium, but the novel is significantly more gratifying, and far more varied and interesting a feast for the consumer.

www.theliterarygothamite.com show less

Grenouille (the French word for frog) is possessed of a super power, the ability to distinguish any scent and its source however mixed it may be with others. Unfortunately his morality steers chaotic neutral at best, which means he thinks nothing of murder if it moves him closer to becoming the greatest perfumer in history. Suskind writes with a surprisingly light tone. Rather than building a sense of dread, it feels more like "Let's see what that rascal Grenouille is getting up to next." The intervention of fate becomes something playful, swooping along in Grenouille's wake as it intersects with the lives he's touched. Then it gets decidedly darker in the latter half, a better match for Grenouille's true character as he matures and his show more methods become more extreme.

This is a curious mix of time-honoured themes about the importance of love and the ultimate emptiness of power, rolled together with some Camus absurdity and a dash of magical realism. I didn't find it altogether satisfying, but it's a short enough and reads quick enough, with the highs of humour and lows of horror to spice it up. I learned far more about making perfume than I ever cared to know, but it's an impressive degree of detail that raised my appreciation for the trade. show less

An odd, grotesque, and disturbing novel, Perfume is nevertheless engrossing. Grenouille, a young man born with an amazingly keen olfactory sense but without an odor of his own, grows up unwanted, unloved, regarded with suspicion - an outsider who soon becomes mistrustful of the entire human race. Convinced that his key to acceptance is by creating the ultimate perfume to be used as his own personal scent, he discovers how to extract the essence of a person's odor, with life-ending consequences to those involved. Grenouille is an odd protagonist in that he's not really one at all - it's not really possible to root for him to succeed in his nefarious plans. In fact, at one point I was convinced he would be thwarted and was actually show more shocked (and somewhat angry) when he was not. Justice is in fact served in a somewhat unsatisfying, though fitting, conclusion.

The story is told an a very detached way, as though the omniscient narrator is still several generations removed from the events he is recounting. There is hardly any dialogue, and it's difficult to really get to know any of the characters, save Grenouille. All this is done on purpose, of course, to emphasize the isolation of the main character. The effect is unsettling and amazing.

Part Les Miserables, part Sweeney Todd, part Phantom of the Opera, this is a terrific read. show less

I actually saw the movie first, a few years ago, and loved it enough to get the book! "Perfume" is a banned book. The narrative is uncomfortably intimate and psychologically unnerving. Like "American Psycho", or "We Need to Talk About Kevin", you witness a killer evolve rather than emerge.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born in a filthy, fish stall, to a mother who had planned to drown him immediately. She was caught and executed, but Grenouille was "an abomination from the start." He exudes no scent of his own, a trait that those around him notice unconsciously. It terrifies even himself. However, he has the most powerful olfactory abilities to ever exist. He can identify smells that have no name. As such he can wander in the dark, show more exhibit seemingly prophetic abilities but always wanting more.

One night he smells a scent so unique, that it categorizes all others. It is a 14 year old girl whom he immediately strangles so as "not to lose a trace of her scent." It is not sexual, Grenouille has no need for that. But this act unlocks Grenouille as a "God" of scent. For he realizes that he can control the actions of others through scent, and harness the power of these "rare flowers." From others he learns how to make perfume, transforming and camouflaging himself. Eventually he begins his pursuit to "capture" the most celestial scent, Laure Richis, a marquis' daughter. But such a relentlessly greedy ambition can only end in the most horrific way.

Grenouille as he is, cannot exist in our world. He can only exist in a bygone era of absolutes. 18th century France is the best setting for this. The Esprit of the times, the primary sources describing the perfume industry and the cosmopolitan access to florals and spices previously unknown. A thoroughly dark, unsettling and enthralling read. show less

"Perfume" is advertised as the story of a murderer, but this phrase sells the novel short: it's also about the unsanitary, odiforous filth that pervaded most aspects of life at the dawn of the modern period, the lonely, blasted emotional terrain of pure psychopathy, and the delicate, arduous process of perfume-making. The novel, which is remarkable for both its impeccable control and rich sensuousness, is also a thriller of a curiously muted sort. It moves slowly, and Suskind's pace never varies. His meticulous descriptions of life in the eighteenth century, of the process of perfume making, of the social ties that defined life during the last days of the French monarchy, would be interesting enough on their own, but, by yoking them to show more the story of his protagonist, a hypersensitive, hate-driven perfumer's apprentice by trade, Suskind suffuses all of this with a delicious sense of mounting dread. The book operates a bit like "Day of the Jackal," and that's high praise indeed.

Since Suskind is a German writing less than half a century after the fall of the Third Reich, it's hard not to read the adventures of its main character as an allegory for fascism. Indeed, it's a comparison that the text, which centers around a character who craves adulation but is incapable of genuine human feeling, invites. What struck me most about "Perfume," though, is how it writes the body. While most readers speak of "picturing" the action of a book in their "mind's eye," this novel's literary universe is constructed specifically for the reader's olfactory imagination. It describes a rich and vivid universe that can only be explored through the sense of smell, and what's more, it argues that the human body is uniquely vulnerable to seduction through the nasal passages. Smells don't just waft in this book: they spread, infect, and invade. To take hold of a person's sense of smell is, in this book, to mesmerize them completely. While I don't think "Perfume" served as the starting point for a canon of nose-oriented novels, its focus on the sense of smell is more than a mere gimmick: it's a welcome variation on the physical experience of reading. "Perfume" is, in the final analysis, a powerful but pleasurable description of the horrors that attend unreason, and it's brave enough to argue that the human capacity for giving oneself over to unthinking pleasure -- or hatred -- is built into our sensory apparatus. It's a bold argument, and, in Suskind's hands, it makes for a beautiful and terrifying book. show less