Perfume

Perfume
by Patrick Suskind

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Book Summary Information

Author: Patrick Suskind
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-07
ISBN: 0307277763
Number of pages: 255
Publisher: Vintage

Book Reviews of Perfume

Book Review: This is a supreme accomplished worked of art.
Summary: 5 Stars

Perfume by Patrick Süskind; Translated from the German by John E. Woods

When I saw the movie Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) last week, I knew had to read the book. And I was greatly rewarded. Although the movie follows the book quite closely, the thought process of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille can only be grasped by reading the book.

At the Cemetière des Innocents market, on July 17, 1738, one of the hottest days of the year in Paris, a fish vendor squatted and delivered her fifth baby. All prior one shad been stillbirths, so after she cut the cord, she abandoned her baby and continued working on her fish stall. However, this time the baby hung to life and cried. There was a turmoil and the baby was given to a nurse and the mother was decapitated weeks later at the place de Grève as prescribed by law.

A few weeks later the wet nurse, Jeanne Busie, stood at the gates of the cloister of Saint Merri, and forced Father Terrier to take the baby away because the baby was sucking her life away and "did not smell" like a human being. Father Terrier in turn, took the baby to Madame Guillard's orphanage, where against all odds it survived: "everyday language soon would prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that (Jean-Baptiste) he had accumulated within himself." Soon..."he created odors that did not exist in the real world. It was as if he were an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odors that enabled him to form at will great number of smelled sentences--"

Madame Guillard's sold Jean-Baptiste to a tanner named Grimal for 15 francs. For her cares Madame Guillard lived to an old age and ended poor and alone because the French Revolution ended her pension and she died, like her father, at Hôtel-Dieu. Grenouille knew (by his smell) that Grimal was capable of trashing him to death for the least infraction and he worked like an animal for one year. He survived and excelled at his new job, but one night, he discovered the one scent that was the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty. Never before in his life had Jean-Baptiste known what happiness was. There at rue de Marais, Jean-Baptiste kills the beautiful girl that produced the essence that captivated him--and he decided that he must become the greatest perfumer of all time.

Now enters Giuseppe Baldini, a perfumer on the Pont-au-Change, which connected the right bank with the Ile de la Cité. Baldini had aged and had lost his ability to create perfumes. Destiny brings him
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille to his door and as the boy is exalted by all the aromas of the shop, Grenouille asks for employment. To prove himself, he copies a perfume created by his competitor--Amor and
Psyche--and improves him to the point where Baldini buys Grenouille for twenty livres of gold, a huge sum. On his way home from celebrating the deal of his life, Grimal falls into the Seine River and drowns.

The House of Baldini becomes an overnight success, and Grenouille learns all he can from Baldini, and at the same time learns how to write the formulas of the perfumes created, which Baldini guarded with his life. Soon Grenouille learns that only substances with essential oils can be distilled and learns that in the town of Grasse, there are three other ways to make perfume: enfleurage à chaud, enfleurage à froid, and enfleurage à l'huile.

Grenouille trades his freedom for over a hundred new perfume recipes and a noncompetitive clause. He gets journeyman's papers that would enable him to travel and lived undisturbed. The night that Grenouille leaves for Grasse; the part of Pont-au-Change, where Baldini lived, collapses killing him and his wife.

The next stage of Grenouille's life was a seven year stint in a cave at the 6000 foot volcano Plomb du Cantal. Grenouille reached the mountain on August 1756--he had escaped the smells, he was truly alone. One day, Grenouille got bored and continued his travels to Grasse. It is here that he discovers that he, Grenouille, has no smell--this made him deathly afraid, it was as if he were dead. However, this gave him the idea to create smells to disguise himself. Protected by various odors, which Grenouille changed like clothes as the situation demanded and which permitted him to move undisturbed in the world of men and to keep his true passion from them.

In Grasse he goes under the employment of the widow Madame Arnulfi, who was sharing her bed with Druot, the first journeyman. Grenouille got hired as a second journeyman for a small amount of money but he was happy, for he was going to create a scent that was not merely human, but superhuman, an angel's scent, so indescribable good and vital that whoever smelled it would have to love him. So he learn at his new workplace from Druot, how the flower blossoms were melted in a large caldron of pork lard, stirring until the oil had appropriated the scent blossom. By adulating Druot, he learned to calculate how many flowers were needed to create the best oil, and he figured out how to capture the scent of everything.

He finds a young woman who reminds him of the young girl at the rue the Marais, September 1753, and he is inspired to create his perfume masterpiece. Soon young beautiful virgins are killed until 24 bodies are dead.

The final victim is the daughter of a very rich and powerful citizen of Grasse, Antoine Richis, the second consul of the city. His daughter, Laure, was Grenouille's inspiration for the 24 killings. Richis figures this out. Trying to protect his daughter, he fakes a caravan to Grenoble, but instead Richis and his daughter, Laure, go to an inn in Cabris. Grenouille's nose guides him to their destination and he commits his last murder at Cabris.

Grenouille is finally caught, because he had asked where Richis' caravan was going to a gendarme, and was seen by Richis at the inn. After a short trial, in view of the fact that they found all twenty five dresses and hair from the victims in his cabin, he is condemned to death. On his execution day, the footmen jumped down, opened a carriage door, and Grenouille steps down wearing a blue frock coat. Somehow, everyone in the audience could not possibly believe that Grenouille was a murderer. Everyone loves him, and acclaims him. An orgy of grand proportion follows and Grenouille just walks back to Paris.

Grenouille felt disgust as humankind completely soured his triumph--he felt not only no joy, but not even a bit of satisfaction. What he had longed for--that other people love him--became at that moment unbearable, because he, Grenouille, could not bring himself to love them back. He hated them. Thus he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred--in hating and being hated.

Grenouille walks back to Paris, to the market where he was born, pours the rest of his perfumed over himself, and the peasants cannibalized him.

This is a supreme accomplished worked of art--a genre of the Magical Realism movement of the greatest Latin American novels--enjoyable and rich in historical detail. A highly sophisticated horror tale.

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Summary of Perfume

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion?his sense of smell?leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"?the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brillance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

Translated from the German by John E. Woods.

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