"Perfume" by Patrick Suskind: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's unmarried mother gave birth to him on a pile of disgusting fish scraps in the sweltering, malodorous streets of 18th-Century France. Perhaps due to his unusual entry into the world, Grenouille was born with a heightened sense of smell, far superior to that of a normal man. I was born in a vat of gin. It explains a lot.
Passers-by find Jean-Baptiste's mother unconscious and the baby covered in rubbish. When she awakes, the poor woman confesses she had abandoned her four previous children in similar fashion, leaving them all to die. She is soon executed for her crimes, leaving the church to care for the orphaned Jean-Baptiste.
The newborn is quick to unnerve his guardians. His first wet nurse gives him up after he literally drinks her dry, consuming more milk than a kindergarten class. And while little Grenouille's acute sense of smell is already honed to perfection, he himself has no scent or bodily odor whatsoever. That little fact freaks out everyone who comes in contact with him. He finally ends up in a loveless boarding house with a number of other neglected children. As he grows older, Grenouille develops into a frail, unattractive lad void of any emotion or human attachment, his scentless presence inspiring fear in the other residents.
With no friends, family, or even remotely interested parties in his life, Grenouille becomes isolated, his entire existence consumed with the pursuit of scents. He uses his unique gift to mentally catalogue thousands of smells. He experiences the world through his nose. Kind of like Ike Turner.
When he turns eight years old, Grenouille is sold as a laborer to a nearby tanner. It's an incredibly dangerous, foul occupation, with a shockingly high mortality rate. Few boys last a year. So, in that sense, it's a lot like dating Paris Hilton. Grenouille doesn't care. He hates people. He hates life. But he loves smells, including the vile odors of a tannery. And he knows he's destined for greatness. Even a nasty case of anthrax doesn't kill him. Anthrax? Wow, maybe he was dating Paris Hilton.
At the age of thirteen, Grenouille earns his weekends off, allowing him to venture into Paris alone, roaming the streets collecting more scents. He's in heaven. After two years of hunting, he discovers a smell unlike any other. It's beautiful. He tracks it like a bloodhound through the teeming streets, tracing it to a deserted courtyard. The delightful aroma belongs to a young girl sitting at a table cleaning plums. She can't be more than thirteen or fourteen years old. And Grenouille isn't interested in the plums. He quietly strangles her, lingering over the dead body until he's inhaled the last whiff of her essence. Drunk with ecstasy, he staggers back to his humdrum life at the tannery, but a seed has been planted.
Grenouille determinedly turns a routine delivery of hides to the famous perfumer Baldini into an apprenticeship, shocking the aged artisan with his miraculous nose. Without the aid of formulas or measurements, Grenouille recreates a popular fragrance on the spot. Baldini, his business failing, sees salvation in the bizarre wunderkind. Grenouille concocts one masterful perfume after another for Baldini, making a fortune for the old man, happily being exploited in exchange for learning his craft. The scentless apprentice hungers for knowledge. He hopes to one day fashion the perfect perfume. A scent so intoxicating it could control humanity. He'll stop at nothing. Not even murder. And lots of it.
"Perfume," subtitled "The Story of a Murderer," was published in 1985, making it one of the more contemporary works reviewed on 70 proof. And it reminded me why I seldom reach outside the classics.
No doubt, the idea of Grenouille, a man obsessed with finding his own scent, is genius. Mr. Suskind makes "Perfume" an olfactory experience, magnificently rendering the oppressive odors of the day, practically turning each page into a scratch-and-sniff book. He also provides a detailed description of perfuming, pedantically explaining the various methods and techniques used in scent extraction. It's reminiscent of Melville's ode to the whaling industry in "Moby- Dick."
While the premise is fascinating, and the perfuming tutorial is somewhat interesting, the story never lives up to its brilliant potential. Mr. Suskind often gets bogged down in his own prose, wandering into superfluous digressions and pointless patter.
Mr. Suskind's verbosity also keeps the reader at a distance, making it difficult to engage with the main character and leaving the pace of the book painfully sluggish. I kept waiting for it to pick up, but it never does.
And despite laying the groundwork for a grand philosophical treatise on man and the illusionary, ephemeral nature of existence, Mr. Suskind fails miserably in imbuing his work with any real significance. It only succeeds as a simple tale of a murderer. The universal is forsaken for the singular. All attempts at meaningful weight are clumsily squandered in a preposterous conclusion. The final few chapters are actually quite laughable.
On the bright side, even though I didn't like the novel, I'm profoundly in debt to its existence. "Perfume" was Kurt Cobain's favorite book. He identified with Grenouille's alienation and greatly admired its admittedly deft depiction of perfumes, scents, and other scintillating smells. It inspired the lyrics to " Scentless Apprentice," a howling, punishing grunge opus on Nirvana's "In Utero" LP.
"Like most babies smell like butter
"Heyyyy, away, go away, go away
"Every wet nurse refused to feed him
"Heyyyy, away, go away, go away
"I lie in the soil and I fertilize mushrooms
"Heyyyy, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away."
His smell smelled like no other
He was born scentless and senseless
He was born a scentless apprentice
Electrolytes smell like semen
I promise not to sell your perfumed secrets
There are countless formulas for pressing flowers
Leaking out gas fumes are made into perfume
You can't fire me because I quit
Throw me in the fire and I won't throw a fit
The song deserves four shots. The book gets two.
RATING: 