Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Reviewed by Christopher Zubris

This book can be summed up in one word. Smell. Its all about the 18th life of Jean-Babtiste Grenouille a boy who’s mother tried to leave him for dead at birth in a pile of fish guts at a Parisian market. Instead of dying he’s found alive and given to monks as an orphan.  Our boy Grenouille is passed from wet nurse to wet nurse, all complaining that ‘the boy doesn’t smell they way a child should, in fact he doesn’t smell at all!’.

The fact that the boy doesn’t have a scent perhaps is what causes Jean-babtiste to develop an almost supernatural sense of smell. He grows up with other orphans who are constantly creeped out by him since he doesn’t talk, nor does he need to be able to see in order to navigate around a dark room. The fact is he can smell almost in the way a bat can hear its way around a cave.

Later on obsessed by scents and wanting to categorize and keep every smell the world has to offer he is bored He’s taken on as a local perfumer’s apprentice and learns to distill scents away from various flowers and herbs. Soon bored he tries distilling the scent away from strange objects , doorknobs , dirt, soil etc. Later on he becomes skilled enough in the art of perfuming to actually start collecting scents from these objects and soon he’s tries his hand at living things like puppies.

The one scent that he obsesses over the most is the scent of a woman. Her scent is so superior to any on earth because it is the ultimate scent. It makes people love her and that scent must be his.

The perfect perfume.

NEEDless to say Our main character is not a normal man. In fact our author likens him to a tick, waiting for fresh blood. While the character himself might be fairly intresting he’s just about the only one that gets any depth of character development. In a way its almost like the author writes this book the way his own main character would have. Its completely selfish in that he is the only person who’s life we know about in any detail. The monks and perfumers get one page blurbs and that’s all we get to know about them. On the other hand a scent is usually described for pages upon pages. This is exactly how the main character thinks, smells are vastly more important than the people around him and as a reader we seem to get Grenouille blinders put on. Suskinds olfactory thesaurus must have lit on fire writing this book.

All that being said the book is good! It gives a dark almost twilight zone feeling as we see grenouille leave a wake of distruction behind him. Its probably only about 200-250 pages and all the fluff is edited out it seems. If you’re the type of person that SAW the divinci code in the theater’s instead of reading it then you’ll be happy to know that this book is, or will be a movie as of 2006 starring Alan rickman ( Hans gruber the terrorist in Die Hard).