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The Scent of Young Womanhood

Author: Patrick Suskind

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born into filth, unwanted. His mother was executed for attempting to kill him. Grenouille was passed from one church to another, one nurse to another, but everyone found something about him, even as a child, that was unsettling, wrong. The infant had no smell, and this was, they felt, a harbinger of something altogether inhuman. Something other and twisted. They were not wrong.

While Grenouille has no scent of his own, he has a powerful gift. He can decipher and catalog odors in a way that no other can. Odors are never unpleasant to him – the smell of a fetid river and a blooming flower are the same in that they give him pleasure. He can parse scents, break them down into their component parts, combine and make new aromas, capture the essence, the very soul, of a smell and keep it, his slave, his obsession. He begins working as a lowly apprentice for a perfumer, but as his gifts show themselves, he moves ever deeper into his craft. Yet, he still has no scent of his own, and his very presence unsettles those around him. He is gifted, yes, but also strange. Dangerous.

Grenouille learns to make scents for himself – scents that make him invisible, that make him beloved, that make him innocuous. He can now hide in plain sight and go about the ultimate project – capturing the scent of flowering womanhood. For this, to immortalize those very few, very special scents, he is willing to kill.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a strange tale, with an old-world, classic cadence. Its language is just as florid as the scents that dance behind its pages, as the heavy, cloying jasmine that fills a perfumer’s shop, as the decayed effluvium gathering in the soiled streets of London, as innocent as mother’s milk and as sharply poignant as the sweat of an honest man leaving his field. The language captures for us an olfactory world that mostly skims us by, pivoting between beauty and squaller, between glorious fragrances and offensive aberrations. It’s the smells that we come to love, just as much as we fear what they mean, and this is how author Patrick Suskind captures us, lures us into this world teaming with life and beauty and ugliness.

Image by Lindy Deneault from Pixabay

Grenouille, however, is just as alien to us as to those around him. This is not a villain with whom we are meant to empathize, or even understand. He is far too removed – a specimen that we find in equal turns interesting and horrifying. He is a true psychopath, yet one that we are compelled to follow, because there is brilliance and insight in his disassociated talent. We have to see what happens, just as we shudder at the casual carnage, the sacrilege of his ultimate perfume. It’s beautifully told horror, evocative and perverse in turns.

The only glitch in an otherwise dark but enchanting fairytale is the strange ending. Its penultimate weirdness is, perhaps, appropriate, yet it seems like a little too much, even for such a strange tale. Overall, however, the cadence of the story, the quality of the telling and the ephemeral beauty of language mixed with base stenches and sublime scents, make this a book that cannot be missed. It’s a deadly indulgence. Highly recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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