A novel about a man with the world's best nose and no smell of his own
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille can pick out the faintest odour across great distances, yet he himself gives off nothing at all. Patrick Süskind built his 1985 novel Perfume around that eerie gap, and the idea travelled: it has been translated into 49 languages and sold more than 20 million copies.
Süskind sets the story in 18th-century France and makes smell its real subject, especially the emotional charge certain scents carry. Grenouille is born in Paris on 17 July 1738 and abandoned at once; his mother is soon executed, and he passes through wet-nurses, a boarding house and a tannery. His surname means frog. One early nurse notices that the baby has no scent and decides he is draining the life out of her, while the boarding-house keeper, who cannot smell anything herself after an old injury, assumes his uncanny knack for finding hidden money means he is psychic.
His gift carries him into perfumery. He dazzles the fading Paris perfumer Giuseppe Baldini by copying and improving a rival's fragrance, and Baldini quietly sells his apprentice's formulas as his own. Hearing that subtler preservation methods than distillation are taught only around Grasse on the French Riviera, Grenouille leaves. On the way, sickened by the smell of people, he spends seven years alone in a cave in the Plomb du Cantal, where he finally grasps that neither he nor anyone else can smell him. He then mixes a fake body odour from everyday materials and is suddenly welcomed as a normal man.
The darker thread is that Grenouille wants to bottle the scent of the rare people who inspire love, and he kills young women to do it, a pursuit that brings him no joy and only deepens his contempt for everyone his perfumes fool. Süskind treats the crimes as the logic of obsession rather than spectacle.
Critics were almost unanimous in praise, and the book stayed on bestseller lists for about nine years, placing it among the biggest-selling novels written in German during the last century. John E. Woods's English translation collected two honours in 1987: the PEN Translation Prize and, unusually for literary fiction, the World Fantasy Award. Several editions, the first among them, used Watteau's painting of a sleeping woman, Jupiter and Antiope, on the cover.
Source: Perfume (novel)
