When I was young, I remember my father had a curious ritual of inhaling the creamy chapters of every new book. This ritual has remained with me ever since, so it was quite fitting that I do the same thing with Patrick Süskind's Perfume.
The joy of anticipation which one gets when smelling a new book's odour of fresh ink and clean, new pages is almost akin to the joy felt by the main character in Süskind's book when he anticipates certain smells over others. The villain of the piece is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a foundling born in the abject poverty of eighteenth century France. From birth, the child is endowed with an enhanced sense of smell which is so refined that he prefers to use it above all other senses to map his view of the world.
This is a determining factor in Süskind's narrative technique. Indeed, the text is underpinned by vivid descriptions of Grenouille's surroundings, captured and interpreted by his sense of smell. From his birth, under a putrid fishmonger's stall in the shadows of the Cimitière des Innocents, to a revelry of the finest scents and spices in a perfumer's laboratory, Grenouille's life unfolds in a series of sensuous aromas and repugnant stenches.
The third-person narration characteristic of many early novels of the eighteenth century, allows us to waft with a familiar omniscient voice through the unfamiliar world of smells. The narrative is a veritable tour de force of adjectival and adverbial representation, for the imprint of a scent is, after all, much more illusive than the graphic portrayal of an image.
One must, however, be aware of the fact that this is a translation by John E. Woods of Süskind's German original, and consequently the reader's perception of the book is coloured by the translator's style and technique. Perhaps, one can hazard the suggestion that the true hero of the piece is smell itself. By the narrator's own admission, smell is very difficult to describe in linguistic terms and the words at our disposal afford us only the most basic structures. Such was also the difficulty for adapting Perfume to film. Until Tom Tykwer's film adaptation, which is still showing, most directors deemed Süskind's work to be unfilmable.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has little use for words when he can literally sniff out even human emotions and intangible states. From the early analogy between a tick and Grenouille, who bides his time, "encapsulated in himself", giving "the world nothing but his dung... not even his own scent", we are taken on a journey of depravity marked by Grenouille's blatant amorality. His first murder sets the pace for a quest based on the desire to posses and become fully subsumed by the ultimate perfume - that of beauty and virginal simplicity.
Grenouille's character develops very little throughout the novel, but acts as a vehicle for the author's comment on humankind through the medium of scent. The graphic descriptions of Grenouille's murderous acts are stripped of their sensual overtones which falsely promise the carnal debaucheries typical of a bodice ripper; but the only eroticism to be found is in Grenouille's revelling in the ethereal quality of the scent of innocence.
The fact that Grenouille means "frog" in French points towards his existence within the twilit niche of amphibious being - living in both water and land, never quite knowing to which he really belongs. The action of retreating in a dark, damp hollow is just what he does when he "encapsulates" himself in a mountain cave for seven years - sublimating his desire to become revered as a great leader, giving himself god-like power over the world as "Grenouille the Great", but only doing it in the palace of the mind.
When he realises that he is scentless, this palace becomes a prison of the mind. His quest for the scent of innocence overcomes his disgust of the human race and leads him to discover a basic formula for human scent, the base elements of which are masked by a thin veneer of fresh natural fragrances: a Swiftian social comment. By blending in with the rest of humanity, Grenouille can get close enough to his young female victims whose pubescent pheromones exude the elixir of purest innocence.
Grenouille's disgust at the human race is perhaps the only thought-provoking result of his existence and this powerful climax is followed by a seemingly banal catastrophe, in which he is cannibalised by a small mob of petty criminals, on the same spot where he was born. It is their last attempt to consume and merge with the painful beauty of the scent of innocence in which he drenches himself.
• Mr Delicata is a teacher and freelance writer, with a Master's degree in English Literature.
• A review copy of this title was supplied by Miller Distributors Limited, owners of Agenda bookshops.
The joy of anticipation which one gets when smelling a new book's odour of fresh ink and clean, new pages is almost akin to the joy felt by the main character in Süskind's book when he anticipates certain smells over others. The villain of the piece is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a foundling born in the abject poverty of eighteenth century France. From birth, the child is endowed with an enhanced sense of smell which is so refined that he prefers to use it above all other senses to map his view of the world.
This is a determining factor in Süskind's narrative technique. Indeed, the text is underpinned by vivid descriptions of Grenouille's surroundings, captured and interpreted by his sense of smell. From his birth, under a putrid fishmonger's stall in the shadows of the Cimitière des Innocents, to a revelry of the finest scents and spices in a perfumer's laboratory, Grenouille's life unfolds in a series of sensuous aromas and repugnant stenches.
The third-person narration characteristic of many early novels of the eighteenth century, allows us to waft with a familiar omniscient voice through the unfamiliar world of smells. The narrative is a veritable tour de force of adjectival and adverbial representation, for the imprint of a scent is, after all, much more illusive than the graphic portrayal of an image.
One must, however, be aware of the fact that this is a translation by John E. Woods of Süskind's German original, and consequently the reader's perception of the book is coloured by the translator's style and technique. Perhaps, one can hazard the suggestion that the true hero of the piece is smell itself. By the narrator's own admission, smell is very difficult to describe in linguistic terms and the words at our disposal afford us only the most basic structures. Such was also the difficulty for adapting Perfume to film. Until Tom Tykwer's film adaptation, which is still showing, most directors deemed Süskind's work to be unfilmable.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has little use for words when he can literally sniff out even human emotions and intangible states. From the early analogy between a tick and Grenouille, who bides his time, "encapsulated in himself", giving "the world nothing but his dung... not even his own scent", we are taken on a journey of depravity marked by Grenouille's blatant amorality. His first murder sets the pace for a quest based on the desire to posses and become fully subsumed by the ultimate perfume - that of beauty and virginal simplicity.
Grenouille's character develops very little throughout the novel, but acts as a vehicle for the author's comment on humankind through the medium of scent. The graphic descriptions of Grenouille's murderous acts are stripped of their sensual overtones which falsely promise the carnal debaucheries typical of a bodice ripper; but the only eroticism to be found is in Grenouille's revelling in the ethereal quality of the scent of innocence.
The fact that Grenouille means "frog" in French points towards his existence within the twilit niche of amphibious being - living in both water and land, never quite knowing to which he really belongs. The action of retreating in a dark, damp hollow is just what he does when he "encapsulates" himself in a mountain cave for seven years - sublimating his desire to become revered as a great leader, giving himself god-like power over the world as "Grenouille the Great", but only doing it in the palace of the mind.
When he realises that he is scentless, this palace becomes a prison of the mind. His quest for the scent of innocence overcomes his disgust of the human race and leads him to discover a basic formula for human scent, the base elements of which are masked by a thin veneer of fresh natural fragrances: a Swiftian social comment. By blending in with the rest of humanity, Grenouille can get close enough to his young female victims whose pubescent pheromones exude the elixir of purest innocence.
Grenouille's disgust at the human race is perhaps the only thought-provoking result of his existence and this powerful climax is followed by a seemingly banal catastrophe, in which he is cannibalised by a small mob of petty criminals, on the same spot where he was born. It is their last attempt to consume and merge with the painful beauty of the scent of innocence in which he drenches himself.
• Mr Delicata is a teacher and freelance writer, with a Master's degree in English Literature.
• A review copy of this title was supplied by Miller Distributors Limited, owners of Agenda bookshops.