topics: |  fiction-historical | french | medieval

A classic page-turner

Hauntingly detailed evocation of 18th c. Paris, even more realistic than Dumas or Victor Hugo. Mixes in an amazing storyline - the throes of a scent obsession that leads the protagonist Grenouille, who has an extraordinary sense of odour, to eventually seek out and murder virginal young women, whose scent he learns to capture using the cold enfleurage process [180]. After killing them unawares (so that their emotions don't freeze the odour), he oils their bodies [217], wrapping them up, and waits for their scent to impregnate the pomade - all part of his quest for the perfect scent, l'essence absolue.

The completely original storyline is set against a background that describes, in meticulous detail, the trade apprentice's miserable life, the smells and sounds of various Paris neighbourhoods, recognizable names such as Pont Royale, Rue Saint-Denis, Saint-Eustache, and Faubourg Saint-Antoine mixing with some that have disappeared - such as the four-story houses lining the bridges (as still exist in modern Florence and elsewhere), the story plots the life of Grenouille, from his birth in a gutter, where his unmarried mother would have left him to die, and the th, and this is conducted to us through sensuous depictions of the smells of 18th c. Paris:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. [opening page, p.3]

Right from infancy, he is not quite normal.  To begin with, he has no odour
- nothing at all, which causes several wet nurses to give up on him.  And
then, he has this tremendous power of smell:

   The tiny wings of flesh around the two tiny holes in the child's face
   swelled like a bud opening to bloom... It seemed to Terrier as if the
   child saw him with his nostrils, as if it were staring intently at him,
   scrutinizing him, more piercingly than eyes could ever do, as if it were
   using its nose to devour something whole, something that came from him,
   from Terrier, and that he could not hold that something back or hide
   it... The child with no smell was smelling at him shamelessly, that was
   it!  It was establishing his scent!  And all at once ... he felt naked
   and ugly, as if someone were gaping at him while revealing nothing of
   himself.  17

Development of an aberrant

If the name of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille ... has been forgotten today, it is because his gifts were restricted to a domain that leaves no trace in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.

[By age six, he has mastered his surroundings olfactorily - so much so, that without entering Madame Gaillard's dormitory, he can tell who are inside; and when she forgets where she has overzealously hidden some money, he unerringly, and unselfishly, uncovers it by smell. 26-27]

He realizes his abilities early on. Soon enoug, everyday language proves "inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself.... For instance, why should smoke possess the name "smoke", when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odors mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire. 25

[...]

Father Terrier was an educated man [but] he preferred not to meddle with
[problems like the truth of the Scriptures - even though biblical texts could
not, strictly speaking, be explained by reason alone] - they were too
discomfiting for him and would only land him in the most agonizing insecurity
and disquiet, whereas to make use of one's reason one truly needed both
security and quiet.  14

The world of odours

... everyday language would soon prove inadequate for designating all the
olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself.... For instance,
the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it
be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenville's senses it smelled and
tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which
cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been
left and so on... Or why should smoke possess the name "smoke", when from
minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odors mixed
iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the
fire. 25

he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of [odors],
to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world. 26

in the narrow side streets off the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin,
people lived so densely packed, each house so tightly pressed to the next,
five, six stories high, that you could not see the sky, and the air at the
ground level formed damp canals where odors congealed.  33

[you can smell the fireworks at Pont-Royal on Sept 1, 1753, celebrating the
King's coronation]
For all their extravagant variety as they glittered and gushed and crashed
and whistled, they left behind a very monotonous mixture of smells: sulfur,
oil, and saltpeter. 38

Children smelled insipid, men urinous, all sour sweat and cheese, women
smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish.  41

The parfumeries de Paris

[Houses on the Pont-au-Change] This bridge was so crammed with four story
buildings that you could not glimpse the river when crossing it and instead
imagined yourself on solid ground on a perfectly normal street. 45

What did people need with a new perfume every season?  Was that necessary? 53

[Baldini, perfumier:] This insanity about speed. What was the need for all
these new roads being dug up everywhere, and these new bridges?  What purpose
did they serve?  What was the advantage of being in Lyon within a week?  Who
set any store by that?  Or crossing the Atlantic, racing to America in a
month -- as if people hadn't got along without that continent for thousands
of years.  56

He had never learned fractionary smelling. 63 [inventive lg, or phrase from
perfumerie lit?]

that would make him greater than the great Frangiapani. [76]
 [frangipani, frangipanni -- any of various tropical American deciduous
  shrubs or trees of the genus Plumeria having milky sap and showy fragrant
  funnel-shaped variously colored flowers - 

  Etymology: 
	The common name "frangipani" comes from a sixteenth-century marquess
	of the Frangipani family of Italy, who invented a perfume scented
	by the new world plant, plumeria, that releases its fragrance at
	night. 
]

the compacted human effluvium oppressed him. 116

6000 ft volcano - Plomb de Cantal, in Auvergne, near Clermont 

The castle's private rooms, however, were shelved from floor to
ceiling, and on those shelves were all the odors that Grenouille had
collected in the course of his life, several million of them.  128

	  [DISCRETENESS OF ODOURS / countability is in strong contrast with
	  amalgam, formulaic graded mixing - e.g. the differences in milk
	  odours depending on which cow, what he ate, etc.  Also, can the set
	  of discrete odours be characterized, even by a single person, given
	  that they may drift (what Wittgenstein had called the "private
	  language" argument?  Earlier p.73 - Baldini: No one knows a
	  thousand odors by name.

[Fear of knowing: should we find out, or should we not?  like an
amniocentesis: what will we do if the child does have a genetic deficiency?
he fights this fear - should he find out that his own body has no odor at
all. 137]

[He develops different types of body odour - inconspicuous, "more redolent,
slightly sweaty, with a few olfactory edges and hooks", odour for arousing
sympathy, odour when he wanted to be avoided - it surrounded him with a
slightly nauseating aura. 182-4]

He did not love... the girl who lived in the house beyond the wall.  He loved
her scent -- that alone, nothing else, and only inasmuch as it would one day
be his alone. 190

"compass of his nose" 210 (Inventive lg, IL]

[Episode where he causes the entire crowd of ten thousand to swoon with his
perfume]
they grew weak as young maidens who have succumbed to the charms of a lover.
[Frenzy of love for him]
respected women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts... men with
members frozen stiff ... fell down anywhere with a groan and copulated in
the most impossible positions and combinations. 239

[Past midnight at a Paris cemetery, he pours the perfume of attractiveness on
himself. A group of thieves and gravediggers feel a frenzied attraction, want
to possess him, and attack him like hyenas, finally eating him.  Later they
are unable to admit this act to themselves. ]

When they finally did dare [to admit it], they had to smile.  They were
uncommonly proud.  For the first time, they had done something out of
p. 255 [last sentence]

Other Reviews

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's
classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one
man's indulgence in his greatest passion — his sense of smell — leads to
murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste
Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a
boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a
prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils
and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop
there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as
brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent
that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate
perfume" — the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative
brillance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual
depravity.

With international sales of 15m copies, it is the most successful German
novel for decades.

That this is in every sense an olfactory novel gives a striking sensory
immediacy to the fiction itself. "Perfume" is a historical novel but one in
which the sheer physicality of its theme lends it an honorary present
tense. And if Grenouille is the hero of the novel, his obsessions are also
its informing presence. Just as he has difficulty with words "designating
non-smelling objects, with abstract ideas and the like," so the novel itself
creates an elemental world in which such abstract matters are only of token
significance. The nose is defined here by a priest as "the primitive organ
of smell, the basest of the senses," with its powers springing from "the
darkest days of paganism"; but it flourishes in Grenouille, even in an age
of "enlightenment," and the unspoken message of "Perfume" is that it
flourishes still: The point about genuine historical fiction is that it is
primarily concerned with the contemporary world. This is not a historical
romance, full of "Prithees!" and strange objects known as poniards, but a
meditation on the nature of death, desire and decay.
	- Peter Ackroyd, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/reviews/ackroyd-suskind.html


---

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.