Read: Perfume by Patrick Suskind

February 4, 2010

It’s been all kinds of busy up here in the Bay Area, but I’m trying to stick to my blogging resolution of writing more reviews – ok so really I said that I’d try to write 3 a week. I’m not quite sure if I’ve managed that yet!

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer opens with an intriguing idea. A man who is “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages”. A man who has been forgotten “because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent”.

We learn of his birth to his fishmonger mother, who gives birth right at her fish stall, and leaves the infant (later to be named Jean-Baptiste Grenuoille) under the gutting table. In accordance with the law, he is given to a wet nurse and the mother arrested. The baby goes from wet nurse to wet nurse who refused to keep him for more than a few days. For he has no smell of his own. And yet, he has such a keen sense of smell, that by the age of six, he had:

“gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odours that did not exist in the real world. It was as if an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odours that enabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences – and at an age when other children stammer words so painfully drummed into them, to formulate their first very inadequate sentences describing the world”.

Hmm yes, Suskind (translated from the German by John E. Woods) is fond of the long sentences. But he does put them to pretty good use, especially when describing this world of scents and odours.

“The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odours into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit of his memory, relishing it whole.”

Can you imagine living in a world where each scent, each odour is so distinctive, so intricate?

One day, he discovers an intoxicating smell:

“… this scent was the key for ordering all odours, one could understand nothing about odours if one did not understand this scent, and his whole life would be bungled if he, Grenouille, did not succeed in possessing it. He had to have it, not simply in order to possess it, but for his heart to be at peace.”

Years later, after he has apprenticed himself to a perfumer and mastered the secrets of blending perfumes, and living on a mountaintop, away from humanity, he comes across that intoxicating smell again. And it has terrible consequences.

Perfume was made into a movie in 2006, starring Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, among others. And as I read the book, I couldn’t quite understand how this movie was to be even remotely successful. How can these intriguing insights into smell be conveyed on film? For that is what makes the book for me. I can imagine that the dark and possibly suspenseful storyline itself and perhaps the setting would make someone go, that would make a good film. But the essence of it, the nuances, the odours… maybe if there was Smell-O-Vision?

Musings on celluloid versions aside, Perfume was a good read. It kept me interested throughout, and made me think quite a bit about our sense of smell and the odours of everyday life.

Book provided by – my library

Listened while I wrote: Martha Wainwright – Martha Wainwright

Written by olduvai Posted in Reading, review, Translated