Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Title: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Author: Patrick Süskind (Translated from German by John E. Woods)

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (1986)

Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction, Literary Fiction

Length: 255 pages

Synopsis:  Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a “gifted abomination,” a man whose olfactory abilities are so extraordinary he can recreate the most exquisite perfumes after smelling them only once.  He could easily be the most renowned perfumer in all of France, but Grenouille has other aspirations.  He plans to create a scent so intoxicating that the world will fall before his feet.  No ordinary ingredients will do, of course.  For this “master scent,” Grenouille will need to bottle the essence of humanity.

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion: 

This is one of the most delightfully disturbing books I have read in quite some time.  In structure, it reminds me quite a bit of classic literature: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure in particular.  I don’t mean to suggest that the text is at all dense or inaccessible.  Quite the contrary, in fact, though I can’t help but wonder how much of that is due to the translation from the text’s original German.  The story keeps the reader at arm’s length from its grotesque central character, allowing the omniscient third person narrator to explore the tangential stories of lives brushing up against Grenouille’s.  None of these lead to any great development of character; indeed, Grenouille’s motives appear hazy even to himself.  Though the characters and plot are quite simplistic, the text itself is anything but.  The book is rife with metaphor, allusion, and opportunities to explore certain truths of the human condition.  Is Grenouille perhaps a human incarnation of Satan, working his will with scent instead of a similarly nebulous evil?  Is he merely a device to reveal the fallibility of humanity, its reliance on instincts considered base and primal?  Without cluttering plot or characterization, the reader is free to explore all these trains of thought while racing through the book itself (it took me only an afternoon or so to finish, despite its length).  Readers unwilling to devote their time to this extra-literary exploration will likely find the book somewhat disappointing, as it lacks many of the “modern” literary conventions and defies categorization by genre.  For anyone looking for a new book-group read or literary paper topic, however, I think Perfume would be an excellent place to start.