This is the first full review I've written in years so yes, it is amateurish, I am an amateur after all, and inconsistent. I did some editing but this took too long to come up with as it is so the bits I left out are going to stay left out and the inconsistency is staying in. Writing this did make me examine what I thought of the book on very specific levels. I plan to keep doing this with each piece of fiction. Hopefully the speed will come and the writing will get better as I keep trying. Oh, and spoilers ahead if you haven't read the novel.
Grenouille, the french word for frog, is born in a dirty Paris street where his mother leaves him to die. She's caught and executed for this. Grenouille is left with the church and wet nurses in the churches employ. The wet nurse, Jeanne Bussie, and Father Terrier discover that Grenouille has no smell. He also has a voracious appetite to consume until the nurse is drained. Grenouille is placed in an orphanage under the care of a woman who has no sense of smell. He survives in Paris by keeping to himself, doing what's asked of him and going unnoticed. Grenouille discovers that he has a supernatural olfactory ability, "no person, no stone, tree, bush, or picket fence, no spot be it ever so small, that he did not know by smell". Eventually working for a perfumer Grenouille begins to learn the processes of extracting scent from the world around him. Grenouille has a hunger to find and catalogue every scent and in his search he finds a scent that enchants him, overpowers him. The scent of particular young beautiful virgins. Not all of them, just those of a certain type. Nabokov's nymphets maybe. He commits his first murder and the reader begins to think the action is about to start. Instead we shortly find Grenouille hiding from society in a remote cave near the summit of a Pyrenees mountain. Here Grenouille discovers that he has no smell. This causes a breakdown. Without a smell, how Grenouille relates to the world, how can he relate to himself? So Grenouille returns to society again and finds work for a perfumer. Here he begins his mission to make his own smell. This mission escalates into murder as he practises the process of stealing the scent, or essence, of a person, nymphets specifically, to perfection so he can extract the scent of one particularly beautiful girl.
The novel starts with immersing descriptions of Paris through scent. Paris at that time smelled mostly of waste and death. The mood created by the descriptions is decisively is dark. The power of smell moves the plot, it moves Grenouille to commit his crimes, it moves him from place to place and it ultimately blinds many into thinking they see beauty. The masked stench of man. Descriptions of smell are done often and almost always uniquely and powerfully. But after a couple hundred pages in Suskind begins to reach to keep up with himself in describing scent and its influence. This is also when the novel begins to feel rushed. It had been somewhat slow but acceptably paced. Chapter after chapter Grenouille is brooding introspectively but then when there is physical action it is skimmed over. There is no suspense. Suskind has a habit of telling you what is going to happen in the narrative then displaying it in the plot. There are no surprises except an attempt at the end which is only surprising in its outlandishness.
The prose is easy. Quick. But there's nothing here that's particularly powerful or poetic. Characters are introspective, which for the most part is the point of view of the book. There are what appears to be important bits, such as dates, names and other events peppered throughout which give the novel a little bit of depth. One of the reasons I was interested in reading this book was I had seen an interview with Kurt Cobain years ago and he was asked what his favourite book was. It was Perfume. The song 'Scentless Apprentice' was based on this novel. I can imagine Kurt relating himself to Grenouille as a reluctant hero and the book reflecting Kurt's own opinions of society.
Suskind's purpose for Grenouille is perhaps to represent greed, consumerism, and waste. The descriptions of Paris mirror Grenouille. Both consume only to toss aside the remains without thought. Grenouille, unable to smell himself thinks nothing of his behaviour but disdains the behaviour of man and the stench that they are and that they create. He wants no part of it so he flees to his cave in the mountains free of all odours of man. Here, belatedly, he discovers he's devoid of scent. If he's such a sniffing superstar how come it took him this long to figure it out? Scent itself is almost a character in Perfume, the scents of things that are natural and beautiful extracted in violence that devours leaving nothing behind but a carcass then used to fake beauty and mask the stench of waste that is created.
For an interesting concept and occasionally clever descriptions I rate Perfume 3/5
Still, awesome.
