Perfume – Patrick Suskind

READ FOR BOOKCLUB
Chosen by Nicole

Perfume is a a cross-genre novel about Jen-Baptiste Grenouille, a Frenchman born into eighteenth-century France. Abandoned by his mother, he has a superior sense of smell and no personal odour of his own. In order to both create a scent for himself and create the prefect scent, he turns into a cold and calculating murderer. He is motivated in particular by one young woman whose scent he desires to possess. Jean-Baptiste becomes an apprentice and then a master perfumer in order to fulfill his desires.

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, not 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 daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris… This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk… and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk – and try as he would he couldn’t fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorised in any way – it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day.

The beauty and skill of perfumery is portrayed in such an intoxicating and romantic manner it is a joy to learn about the creation of each and every scent and infact often side tracked us readers from remembering Jean-Baptiste is a murderer and a psychopath.

It sounds gruesome but the story is so well developed we kind of fell into it without realising how obscene it actually was. When you find yourself not only accepting the deeds of a psychopath but seeing the beauty in their skill, you know the book is well written!

Described by the bookclubbers as “totally riveting”,  “obscene”, “beautiful” and “gruesome”. Often all at once!

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Published 1985
Hamish Hamilton (UK)
263 pages