Product Description

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. It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin. And to get it he must kill. And kill. And kill.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4957 in Books
• Published on: 1987
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
An unforgettable account of the possessor of a fine nose and a murderous heart. The reek of 18th-century Paris comes right off the page as Suskind unravels his unpleasant tale with relish. (Kirkus UK)

From a West German playwright: an elaborate historical fable about smell, set in 18th-century France - obsessive, showy, heavily (if rather murkily) metaphorical, with a fair amount of black-comic dazzle but only a glimmer or two of genuine narrative magic. Suskind's monster - hero is Jean. Baptise Grenouille, born in stench-ridden Paris in 1738, an instant orphan (his fishwife-mother is beheaded for multiple infanticide), rejected by society, barely allowed to live. But, though ugly, deformed, and hateful, Grenouille has been born with a double-miracle when it comes to odor: he himself is odorless. . .and he has super-powers of smell for the odors around him! And soon, inspired by the glorious aroma of a luscious maiden (whom he kills), young Grenouille vows to become history's greatest perfumer, to "revolutionize the odoriferous world." He becomes the apprentice to a leading Parisian perfumer, quickly outdoing his master; he manically absorbs every smell-extracting technique, nearly dying of a broken heart when he fails to distill scent from glass, leather, or gravel. Then he spends seven years in glorious egomaniacal isolation, a godlike hermit in a mountain cave, free of human smells around him. But an olfactory identity-crisis - he's aware of, but can't quite smell, his own body odor - sends Grenouille back into society, now determined to concoct an artificial substitute for human scent. Eventually his obsession leads him to kill two-dozen lovely virgins, extracting a super-scent front their hair, clothes, etc. And though this ultimate perfume enables Grenouille to escape the guillotine (it makes him a demigod and drives the masses into orgiastic frenzies), he's nonetheless driven to suicide-by-cannibalism: "If he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell with it, with the world, with himself, with his perfume." In John Woods' stylish translation, Suskind's central premise has strong resonance at the start. At book length, however, the notion wears thin; the nature of Grenouille's paradox, with its thematic subtext (smell as human-ness, as self-knowledge, etc.), becomes both repetitious and inconsistent. And Suskind's storytelling, short on memorable supporting players, lacks the Candide-like brio needed to sustain involvement in such an arch and stagy (if frequently impressive) exercise. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
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. It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin. And to get it he must kill. And kill. And kill.

About the Author
Patrick Suskind was born 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. 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. Patrick Suskind lives and writes in Munich.

Customer Reviews

Overrated
A weird and unsettling book. It included some tedious description about things I found uninteresting (the ways purfumers distill/mix their scents etc) and this put me off (I was tempted to skip paragraphs). It was, however, creepy and off-beat enough to keep me focused and so I read until the end.

There is also alot of build-up and background info regarding the protangonist. This was good to a degree in setting the characterisation and atmosphere, but disappointing in that it didn't get to the meat and potatoes of the action (the multiple murders!) until quite near the end. I found this to be an anti-climax.

The ending left me feeling slightly unsettled and glad that the book was over and I could read something else.

Although I wouldn't call it absolutely 'gripping', it did interest me enough to read on and see what happened in the end (although to be fair, my time probably could have been better spent doing other things).

All in all, an overrated book but worth a look perhaps if you want something unusual.

A book to savour
It's an extraordinary book. When a book is a classic, you just know it right there. This one is. It is beautifully written and very original. I read it in Russian and Dutch and loved both translations. It may sound elitist, but I believe, one has to be an aesthete to be able to appreciate this book. Those who like dynamic page turners will be disappointed. It's a book to savour.

Bit of a stinker
'Magic Realism' as a writing style always hovvers on the boundary between the hyperreal and the hopelessly unreal. If a book falls into the latter category then only enormous wit and verve can save it.

Sadly Perfume is Magic Realism at its most depressing. It is hopelessly unreal: its central character undertakes a life journey that makes nonsense of time, place and plot. But then it has no wit or verve either: beyond the lively opening it is a ploddingly pendantic exercise in showing just how much research the author has undertaken on the subject of scent.

The key problem however is the book's hero - or anti-hero as Suskind would probably prefer. He is so repulsive, so unlikeable, so uninteresting. Worse still, he does not possess the intriguing back story or psychological depth that can sometimes lead us to sympathise with even the most unattractive characters. Not for one moment did I care what happened to him or why. And that's not a good basis for any story.

What Suskind has here is a clever short story or novella which is so overstretched that his limitations as a writer become visible. The opening is beguiling and atmospheric, and the premise intriguing; the ending is clever and well disguised. If he had compressed what sits in between by two-thirds, perhaps the whole piece - if no more real - would at least have had some magic.