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Title: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind, John Woods, Carol Brown Janeway ISBN: 0394550846 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: June, 1988 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.34
Rating: 5
Summary: FEE, FIE, FOE, FUM...
Comment: This is a novel so beautifully written that it transcends into literature. Ingenious in its conception and carefully crafted, the author has created a unique and dazzling work of fiction. Divided into three parts, the book tells the story of a most unusual life, that of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.
The first part of the book establishes that he was born to a woman who was hung from a gibbet for having left him to die. It turns out that Jean-Baptiste is an unusual baby. He gives people the willies, because, unlike most babies, Jean-Baptiste has no scent.
Over time, Jean-Baptiste develops into a boy with a secret gift. His olfactory sense is developed to a degree unheard of in humans. He delights in parsing the odors around him. Ugly, friendless, and a loner, he eventually ventures into the city of Paris, a malodorous and pungent cornucopia of smells. Believe me, there is plenty to sniff out in eighteenth century Paris! Jean-Baptiste savors each whiff, and the book conveys these olfactory delights with meticulous, descriptive precision.
His bleak existence is transformed, however, when he one day captures a heady scent of such exquisite beauty that he finds himself obsessed with it. Determined to have that scent at all costs, he eventually sniffs it out. It turns out to be the scent of a young virgin on the cusp of flowering into a woman. It is a scent that he must possess. What he does to do so will surely chill the reader.
Jean-Baptiste eventually maneuvers to get himself apprenticed to a perfumer, so that he can have the opportunity to learn the trade and create scents. He leads a bleak existence, subsisting as little more than a slave to the perfumer for whom he works.
The second part of the book begins when Jean-Baptiste leave his employer and goes on a personal pilgrimage, leading an austere existence away from civilization for many years. There, he withdraws into himself even further, living a totally self-sustaining, hermitic existence. He ultimately realizes what other have sensed about him. Jean-Baptiste has no personal scent. He simply does not smell.
With this knowledge, he returns to civilization where, having lived as practically an animal for many years, he creates a fictitious and adventurous scenario to account for his filthy and disgusting appearance. Subsequently, he is taken under the wing of some local nobility and feted and pampered. Realizing the importance of scent, he creates a personal scent for himself. He now realizes that he who has the power over scent can rule supreme. He intends to do so.
The third part of the book has Jean-Baptiste migrating to a town that is the hub for the scent trade. Perfumes, oils, and soaps are the stock in trade for this town and, as such, beckon brightly to Jean-Baptiste. Once there, he again smells a scent so delectable that he longs to possess it. He knows that scent for what it is and now knows that it is the scent, and not the personal charms of its bearer, that captures the attention and devotion of others. Jean Baptiste wants to harness that scent at all costs. He desperately desires the power to make others love him. He wants to be supreme.
It is his desperate desire to harness and possess that celestial scent that causes Jean-Baptiste, a socio-path with little empathy for others, to prey upon the maidens of the town in order to obtain that which he needs. It is his obsession that lays at the heart of the vortex that arises in the town, as murder after murder occurs. Yet, no one suspects him. What ultimately happens leads to an almost unbelievable climax, when Jean-Baptiste finds himself consumed by the passion he has managed to arouse in others through scent.
This is a heady, quirky, and compelling debut novel, like nothing I have ever before read. Complex and lyrical in its telling, it is a novel that stays with the reader long after the last page is turned. Bravo!
Rating: 5
Summary: Intoxicating
Comment: This is my all-time favourtie book. After searching endlessly to find a copy anywhere, I finally came across a second-hand copy at a flea market ..., where I was told that if they had enough copies, they would easily be able to sell at least one a day, which is big business for a little flea market.
The best way that I can describe this book is to use an oxymoron, that being beautifully disgusting. The 18th century French setting, the description of the central charater Grenouille's soulless talents, pursuits and desires for his ultimate scent, and everthing from start to finish is simply magnificent.
The feeling I get from this book every time I read it is one of cyclical completion. For me, the story starts at a logical place (the birth of Grenouille, the "gifted abomination", which is possibly my favourite phrase from the entire book), runs full circle and then ends at a logical place. Not to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but I certainly wouldn't want this story to end any other way.
Suskind's description of Jean-Baptiste's exceptional olfactory endowment is thorough and exact. Let's face it, scent isn't exactly easy to write about! If the reader was unable to empathise with what is essentially the character's entire universe, his passion for and understanding of smell, then no one would stick with the book long enough to learn what is his life's purpose (pretty much the entire point to the book), to create his 'magnum opus', a scent that would inspire (or more accurately, command) others to feel love. The author's assertion that people do not feel love for others through any will of their own, but simply through the aura that comes with the emission of scent is quite unique and gives purpose to why Grenouille is such a revolting, fiendish and unloved social detestation. He isn't just a murderer who likes to kill, or who has been wronged and is seeking vengeance, he simply WANTS something that his victims possess. This is truly a brilliant and inspired read, one that I would recommend to anyone at all, but particularly to those who enjoy a dark look into the macabre and cold existence of an inhuman monster. Best of all, it could never be made into a disgusting piece of Hollywood trash as it contains very little conversation or interaction with other characters.
PS. Just an interesting fact, Kurt Cobain wrote the track "Scentless Apprenctice" that appears on Nirvana's In Utero album about this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating, but not quite a Masterpiece
Comment: When the first english language version of "Perfume" was released in 1986, readers went crazy. Many placed it among the best books they'd ever read, myself included. A reread, fifteen years later yields a different, more muted, reaction. The book is good, very good. But it is not great.
"Perfume" succeeds so well because the premise is so startlingly novel. An olfactory genius in 18th-century Paris who can make a fortune creating perfumes more complicated and subtle than any ever made, is a sociopathic monster. Or as Suskind describes him, a "tick" who can roll up into a defensive ball or periodically drop himself into society. Grenouille is a compelling and disturbing character because Suskind has painted him in such realistic tones. Each effort to capture a new scent impels him farther, taking more chances and testing his limits, exploiting new techniques and his own criminal daring. This is true criminal pattern and makes Grenouille terrifyingly believable.
But the book can not be a great one, because Suskind's prose tends toward the overdone. Perhaps it reads better in the original German, but his maddening penchant for rephrasing and repeating the same notion and turning a sentence into a paragraph finally dulls the senses and sets the reader skimming along searching for the next important point.
The plot is so unique that it is brilliant. The execution is powerful, not only in Grenouille's characterization, but also because Suskind has done his homework and is smoothly at ease with 18th century mores and the science of perfume. But the squishy repetitive prose and unfocused paragraphs keep "Perfume" from joining the ranks of literary masterpieces.
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Title: Brother of Sleep by Robert Schneider, Shaun Whiteside ISBN: 0879515953 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: August, 1995 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Das Parfum: Die Geschichte Eines Morders by Patrick Suskind ISBN: 3257228007 Publisher: Distribooks Intl Pub. Date: June, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, John Woods, Belzer ISBN: 0394563158 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: March, 1990 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume by Mandy Aftel ISBN: 0865475539 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Obsession, Perfume, and the Last Mystery of the Senses by Chandler Burr ISBN: 0375507973 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 21 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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