PERFUME by Patrick Suskind

Reviewed by Andrew Seal

Stanley Kubrick, the director of incredible film adaptations of books as varied and complex as Lolita, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, once remarked that Patrick Süskind’s Perfume was simply unfilmable. Of course, such judgments have been of little use in preventing directors from trying their hand at adapting other supposedly “unfilmable” novels, such as Ulysses or Tristram Shandy, and so I now find myself anticipating the release of Tom Tykwer’s attempt to prove Kubrick wrong.
Disregarding Tykwer’s brilliance or ingenuity (Tykwer is most famous for the radically innovative cult masterpiece “Run, Lola, Run”), I feel Kubrick may nevertheless have a point. While other “unfilmable” novels such as Ulysses, Shandy, or even Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (which to my knowledge—and IMDb’s—has not been adapted to film) are difficult to adapt mainly because of their textual complexity, Perfume is not a challenging or mind-befogging read in the slightest. It doesn’t have any of what we now recognize as metafictional conceits or tricks. It’s a traditional, linear, third-person-narrated tale that doesn’t really try to deceive the reader or toy with her mind. (Although this was, interestingly enough, not the judgment of many of its first reviewers and critics, including John Updike, who said “we close the book with the presumably postmodern sensation of having been twitted.” My opinion is that it is John Updike who is the twit and not the book that is doing the twitting, but I digress.)What makes Perfume so difficult to conceive of in a filmic incarnation is, very simply, the subject matter. It’s about scent, about odor, about art in its olfactory dimension—in other words, about a totally different sensory apparatus than the one you use to view a film or even read a book. But what Süskind can do in a novel to evoke and circumscribe the reality of scent is not really new—from Proust’s conjuring À la recherche du temps perdu from the odor of a madeleine dipped in tea to Joyce’s own incredible description of sausages frying in Ulysses, encapsulating the idea of a scent in text is a well-established and almost conventional exercise. Not so in the world of film. There is effectively no standard filmic method or grammar for representing the world—and not just the effects—of an odor.

For that is just what Süskind is able to do—to create an actual olfactory world, superimposed on our pedestrian visual/tactile reality, but loosed a bit from its moorings—floating, one might say, in an altogether other ether. Perfume works on the reader in strange ways; eerily, during the time I read the novel, I found myself much more sensitive to odors, even though I had a cold. So powerful are the descriptions of odors, one can almost imagine the possibility of entering into this other world, a world constructed only of odors.

Süskind uses a variety of methods to accomplish this little sleight-of-scent—catalogues of odoriferous products, rich comparisons of an exotic or rare scent to some more mundane smell, and, most memorably, vivid descriptions of the contours and dynamics of a smell as it moves into and through a person or a crowd. In other words, Süskind animates scent as an active force in its own right in a way I have never encountered. For example, Marcel is acted upon by the smell of madeleines and tea, but it is essentially a singular, static encounter. Almost no scent is static or singular in Perfume. All scents exist in a world where they can interact rather like characters, growing, developing, and perishing not alone, but in the presence of others. Süskind doesn’t use odors in a vulgar way as leitmotivs or mere attributes of major or minor characters, but in a way that almost gives them a subjectivity.

Subjectivity itself is at the center of the novel, but in a way that is very different from most postmodern or even modernist engagements with the issue. Subjectivity, or identity if you prefer, is dependent on the individualized nature of scent, but neither scent nor subjectivity are fully contained one by the other—there is seepage of a sort, or, in the case of the novel’s villain/hero, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a total lack. Grenouille is born without any personal scent at all, and so, lacking a certain vital element, is almost mechanistic, described frequently as a silent tick. Yet he is at once the most active, most self-aware, most self-controlled character in the novel. Süskind grants to Grenouille an extraordinary latitude of unabashedly superhuman powers—it is almost as if Grenouille transcends the subjectivity of smelly humans rather than lacking it. Not being tied to a scent, Grenouille creates his own personal odors, mimicking with precision the smells even of other people. Scents, while they identify people as individuals, are fully fungible, can be manufactured and exchanged, replaced and discarded, although only by Grenouille.

Grenouille’s sinisterly exceptional nature and his uncanny gifts have led many critics to designate him as a Romantic hero, or even a representation of the growth of the Third Reich (a comparison I honestly don’t get). Certainly, most people feel quite comfortable in labeling Perfume a Gothic tale. Yet I believe Süskind is allegorizing neither the Romantic era nor writing a Gothic tale. Both categorizations are, in fact, anachronistic to the setting of the novel, which is very self-consciously 18th century France. Süskind opens the novel by describing Grenouille as “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages” and goes on to compare him with other “gifted abominations”—the Marquis de Sade, Louis de Saint-Just, Joseph Fouché, Bonaparte. It would have been no stretch to have added Robespierre, Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire. And while the notion of a gifted abomination became quite dominantly a Romantic trope (and Rousseau and Bonaparte picked clean as inspirations for Romanticism), it is also a powerfully retrospective evaluation of the growth and development of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, with its still alchemically-inflected science and its truly eccentric polymaths, its almost ludicrous assuredness in its own progress and genius, its overwhelming sense of the grand burgeoning of human power, its teetering feeling of nearing the top of a new Tower of Babel, its drive to collect, catalogue, and itemize the whole universe—all of that, the heady sense of a whole civilization’s success at becoming ever more “civilized”—is difficult to capture, particularly in film, but also in literature.

To accomplish this, Süskind creates a representative figure, Grenouille, whose personal trajectory mirrors the story of the growth and development of the Enlightenment’s spirit and ideals—from the literal gutters to the figurative stars, and then to a complete disintegration, a cannibalization of the very elements that composed and sustained the trajectory in the first place. Süskind succeeds marvelously in this allegorizing, if not a little too overtly, in my mind. There seems to be no attempt to hide the author’s intention to compare Grenouille’s genius (often called Promethean by the narrator) to the others of his day—in his youth, his compositional gifts at combining scents is compared to Mozart’s with notes; he later becomes an encyclopedist of scents, scouring every corner of Paris in a completist frenzy; still later he creates a pleasure-world of olfactory sensuousness which can only be compared to the sexual fantasies of de Sade. It is his drive throughout to “revolutionize the odoriferous world” by finding and capturing the scent that was “the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered,” “the master scent.” This drive to find a higher principle which orders all else was the very heart of every effort of the Enlightenment, and it is Grenouille’s complete and total absorption in that project that marks him as a hero of the Enlightenment.

If you know something about the plot of the book, however, you know that, if Perfume is an allegory for the Enlightenment, Süskind does not exactly come down on the side of the era’s fans. Grenouille’s macabre, maniacal quest to attain his magical formula results in the murders of twenty-five young women. Süskind suggests, then, that an undeniably inhuman core lies at the center of the era’s aspirations to greatness. There is a horror story to be told alongside the tales of triumph, and Süskind tells that horror story very well.

There is, however, more to it than that. While gripping in its intensity and extraordinary in the sheer virtuosity of its terror, Perfume is disquieting in a way that most horror tales cannot be, for one gets the feeling that these murders are in some sense necessary, not just narratively, but psychologically—Grenouille acts as a cipher for our notions of identity, originality, and genius, and his victims are sacrifices to the purity of those notions—necessary, almost, for their survival.

Can a film already struggling to accomplish what is in effect a double translation—from scent to sight and from text to image—also give the sense of these stakes? I am not sure, but I am quite positive that Süskind’s book does succeed—wildly—both as a deviously addictive, well-plotted narrative and as a complex evaluation of the heritage and effects of an era that shapes our lives and our minds daily.

Perfume acknowledges on the first page that its subject is “a domain that leaves no traces in history: […] the fleeting realm of scent,” but its actual effect belies that claim of ephemerality. Just as the words and ideas of the Enlightenment still resound, so the details of the novel will drift through your memory for days, if not weeks, after you have laid the book down.

About the Author

Patrick Süskind was born in Ambach, near Munich, in 1949. He studied medieval and modern history at the University of Munich. His first play, The Double Bass, was written in 1980 and became an international success. It was performed in Germany, in Switzerland, at the Edinburgh Festival, in London, and at the New Theatre in Brooklyn. His first novel, Perfume became an internationally acclaimed bestseller. He is also the author of The Pigeon and Mr. Summer’s Story, and a coauthor of the enormously successful German television series Kir Royal. Mr. Süskind lives and writes in Munich.

About the Film

Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), the film adaptation of Perfume stars Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman. The film opened on September 14th in Germany to rave reviews and is being rolled out across most of the rest of Europe.  Stateside release is scheduled for December 27th.