Perfume, by Patrick Suskind

Sometimes reviewing a book long after its debut can be helpful, especially if the book is quite popular with the public. A delayed criticism allows a more detached and objective reading. In 2006, twenty years after its first U.S printing, the film adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was released in theaters. Although the film received scant attention, it did spike book sales and is a perfect catalyst for current criticism of the book.

The narrative of Patrick Suskind’s novel is fairly straightforward. The book follows the life of Jean-Baptist Grenouille, an orphan growing up in 1700s Paris, a child gifted with a sense of smell unrivaled in all of history. Grenouille lives in an olfactory universe, smelling, differentiating and cataloging every scent he encounters, whether pleasant or wretched, unique or banal. He eventually becomes an apprentice to a perfumer in Paris, where he constructs sublime perfumes, fragrances beyond measure. In this trade Grenouille finds his passion in life - to create the ultimate scent.

Some of Suskind’s best writing concerns Grenouille’s world of smell, for the author delivers vivid descriptions of aromatic objects and places, such as Grenouille’s native Paris. In the opening pages he writes, “The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of smoldering wood and rat droppings…the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.”

But not all details are so unpleasant, for Suskind gives an illustrative account of perfume-making as Grenouille works with rosemary, mint, nutmeg, lime oil, storax balm, bergamot, sage, caraway seeds, orange blossom and countless other ingredients, extracting their scents by way of boiling, distilling, condensing, drying, and cooling, to name a few methods. Grenouille becomes totally immersed, as does the reader, into this world of smell. And he makes perfume using perfectly exact proportions, not by recipe, but by imagination, and not by measuring cup, but by nose.

But our olfactory wunderkind has a secret, whereby the book is given much of its narrative thrust. It is no plot spoiler to announce - given the book’s subtitle - that Grenouille is a killer. Grenouille has a specific purpose for his deeds, for he murders certain nubile girls not for kicks, but for their remarkable scents.

But it is Grenouille himself that is the problem with the novel, for he is just plain uninteresting as a character. We are told he has little understanding or interest in theology, philosophy, morality or anything else for that matter. Though some readers will detest Grenouille for his crimes, this is not truly why he lacks the reader’s understanding or sympathy. There have been many characters on the page and screen that have committed odious acts and yet the reader or audience still roots for them. Both Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter come to mind. Perhaps Michael Corleone could also be added to the list.

But Grenouille cares and only cares for smell, hardly something anybody could identify with. The singular weakness that gives Grenouille the barest whiff of humanity is that he himself has no scent whatsoever, a fact that haunts him throughout the book and that pushes his desire to create the greatest scent and rule the world. But this is just not enough to make him human. Of course this has not kept the novel from being an international bestseller and earning praise from all sorts of critics, however unearned those accolades might be.

Despite this major flaw, the novel does offer insight, almost allegorically, into the life of an artist and what happens when art consumes an individual. Perfume would have made a better short story or perhaps even a novella, but with an insipid protagonist, not even the most florid writing can sustain interest for two hundred and fifty-five pages.