Perfume

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born under a fishmonger's stall in the filthiest part of 1738 Paris, survives an infancy nobody wants him to survive, and proves to have an olfactory sense of impossible acuity.

He has no scent of his own, which makes other people obscurely uneasy in his presence, and he becomes fixated on capturing and preserving the scents he values most.

He can smell everything and gives off nothing, and both facts organise his life.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel's achievement is sustained description of an experience prose is badly equipped for. Süskind builds an entire sensory vocabulary and uses it consistently for three hundred pages.

The eighteenth-century city is rendered almost entirely through odour — tanneries, corpses, markets, bodies — and the effect is genuinely immersive rather than merely clever.

He has almost no interiority in the conventional sense: no morality, no attachment, no self-conception beyond appetite.

The novel treats this as a consequence of his scentlessness. Having no smell, he has no social existence, and the book suggests that identity is substantially a matter of how others register you.

Long sections detail enfleurage, distillation, the economics of the Grasse trade and the composition of a formula, and the technical material is accurate and absorbing.

The craft passages function the way procedure does in a thriller: they make the impossible project seem feasible step by step.

It is a historical novel, a murder narrative, a fable and a satire, and it declines to settle into any of them.

The murders are treated almost without moral weight, described in the same register as a distillation, which is the book's most disturbing and most deliberate decision.

Süskind sets the story in the century of reason and fills it with superstition, filth and commercial cruelty, and several characters expound rationalist theories that are comprehensively wrong.

The satire is directed at the period's confidence in its own understanding, and Grenouille's genius is precisely the faculty that century least valued.

Once Grenouille can construct scents that produce emotional responses, he acquires a means of controlling how people feel about him without their knowledge.

The novel becomes an argument about charisma as a manufactured effect, and the late crowd sequence takes that to a conclusion that is both absurd and logically earned.

Ornate, ironic and mock-eighteenth-century, with an intrusive narrator who comments, digresses and passes judgement in the manner of a period chronicler.

The English translation by John E. Woods is widely admired and preserves the register, which is essential since the tone carries most of the book's effect.

Grenouille's victims are young women valued entirely for their scent, and the novel describes them almost exclusively as raw material.

Whether this constitutes critique of objectification or an instance of it is the standing argument about the book. The narration's coldness is deliberate, but it is also relentless.

It was an enormous international success and remains one of the best-known German novels of the late twentieth century.

Süskind withdrew almost entirely from public life afterwards, declining interviews, prizes and nearly all comment on the book, which has itself become part of the novel's mythology. He has published very little since, and the silence has been read as consistent with the work.

Tom Tykwer's 2006 adaptation is visually inventive and necessarily loses the narration's irony, which is where much of the novel's meaning sits.

It also softens Grenouille toward pathos, giving him a longing the prose version does not grant. The book is considerably colder about him and offers the reader no route to sympathy at all, which is the harder and more interesting position.

It is shorter and faster than its reputation suggests, and the craft and period material make it absorbing even for readers uninterested in the fable.

Expect no moral instruction and no likeable character. It is a novel about appetite, rendered with complete technical seriousness and no warmth at all.