Patrick Süskind

Our sense of smell and how it can trigger emotional feelings and memories is used in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind as we read about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell but without a personal scent of his own. This young orphan exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath as he has no sense of empathy toward people or animals and only cares about how he can use them to his advantage.

After a very difficult young life, he is able to talk his way into becoming apprenticed to one of Paris’ successful perfumers but in his search for new smells he encounters a young girl with a wondrous personal scent. He murders her simply to have access to that scent. Eventually he leaves Paris in an attempt to learn new techniques so that he can preserve an even wider range of odors. Although he becomes increasingly disgusted with people and spends some time living as a hermit, he soon heads to the south of France and works for a perfumer there. He also finds another young girl whose scent makes him believe that he can develop a perfume that would hypnotize people into thinking the wearer is god-like. In his quest for developing this perfume he murders more young women in order to use their body parts to evolve the fragrance that he is working on.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a gruesome, fantasy tale in which the author blends both factual information and fairy-tale story telling about a murderer and his obsessive quest for a perfect perfume. I found the information and facts about the manufacture of perfume to be very interesting but, this was a difficult book to enjoy due to it’s dark themes. However, the author gives us well written prose that elevates the story and makes us ponder upon the importance of fragrance.… (lisätietoja)