Perfume exerts a mysterious power

Michelle McGrane

Perfume The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind* Translated by John E Woods Penguin Red Classics Price: R90 ISBN 0141023597 (First published as Das Parfum in 1985) Click here or on book cover to buy the Perfume

Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.

“In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here …” The book opens in Paris, July 1738, a vast city engulfed in a haze of putrescent odours, pollution and human decay.

The stench of sulphur rises from chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses, the stench of congealed blood. People stink of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths comes the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they are no longer very young, comes the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’s fisherwoman mother squats down under a gutting table and gives birth, before abandoning him amid offal, fish heads and a swarm of flies. The baby boy begins life not with a hopeful gasp for air but with a bloodcurdling scream. His mother is subsequently arrested, found guilty of multiple infanticide and decapitated at the Place de Grève, while the infant is farmed out to the first in a line of “caretakers”.

After surviving birth on a rubbish heap, little Grenouille proves he has a tough constitution, enduring living conditions which would kill most humans. Raised without love, or human warmth, he is as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree, living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before:

He was an abomination from the start. He decided in favour of life out of sheer malice and sheer spite. Along with his capacity for endurance, the young boy grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human’s. Although born without a smell of his own, Grenouille is an olfactory genius.

The awkward gnome with ungainly hands, a pockmarked face and bulbous old man’s nose hunts the Parisian streets, the greatest preserve of odours in the world:

It was a mixture of human and animal smells, of water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw. Thousands upon thousands of odours formed as invisible gruel that filled the street ravines, only seldom evaporating above the rooftops and never from the ground below … There was hardly a corner of Paris that was not paralysed with people, not a stone, not a patch of earth that did not reek of humans.

One night, while watching a display of fireworks in honour of the King’s coronation anniversary, the cunning and confident Grenouille is captivated by an exceptionally delicate, fine and unfamiliar smell; it is exquisite, magical:

This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, nor that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water … and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress or musk has, or jasmine or narcissi, not as rosewood has or iris … like a piece of thin, shimmering silk … and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk …

Following the ribbons of this elusive odour, fifteen-year-old Grenouille murders his first virgin in an attempt to preserve the best part of her and make the principle of her scent his own. The tick has smelled blood …

The young sociopath becomes apprenticed to the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini. With his adept nose, he learns the language of perfumery and realises his higher destiny as creator of the most sublime fragrances in Paris. Grenouille “the Great, the Incomparable, the Magnificent” turns the world of perfumery upside down and shakes its foundations. He desires to sweep the evil stench of his past away, to turn the world into a fragrant Garden of Eden, where life will be bearable for him, olfactorily speaking. Yet there is one odour that obsesses yet eludes him. He wants that scent, the scent of a virgin. He wants “to peel it from her like skin and to make her scent his own”.

Out of a century of decline and disintegration, Patrick Süskind has distilled a clear, glistening and splendid essence absolue of 296 pages; like a great, classical maître perfumeur, he has proved mastery of his art. He makes it easy for the reader to empathise – even sympathise – with an unconscionable, criminal protagonist who has no concept of good and evil.

The plot is highly original, the details meticulously researched, and Süskind’s skilful, ironic narrative is evocative and atmospheric. Eighteenth-century Paris, the French countryside, and the science of perfumery come alive in these erotic scent-drenched pages. Perfume is so absorbing, beautifully written and rich with imagery, I was reluctant to finish it.

“Perfume lives in time; it has its youth, its maturity and its old age. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life can it be called successful.” On the 60th anniversary of Penguin Classics, it is apt that a Chanel No 5 of contemporary fiction such as Süskind’s Perfume has been included in the new Classics list, Penguin Reds. Indulge yourself.

*

Patrick Süskind was born in 1949. He studied history in Münich and was a writer for television before he wrote Perfume. His second novel, The Pigeon, later adapted as a play, was first staged at the BAC Theatre in London in May 1993. His play The Double-Bass was first staged in Münich in 1981 and has since become one of the most performed plays in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It has also been performed at the Edinburgh Festival and at the Royal National Theatre in London. His novella The Story of Mr Sommer (1992) has been a success all over the world and his Three Stories and a Reflection was published in 1996. Patrick Süskind lives in Münich.

LitNet: 21 February 2006

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