PERFUME
The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Suskind
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986
255 pp., $16.95
With an intriguing, indeed an intimidating, barrage of publicity, Knopf announced the publication of the English translation of Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. "A first novel unlike anything you have ever read...an international phenomenon...a major bestseller" in France and Germany since its 1985 appearance, raves the publisher's flyer. Blurbs from European reviewers are similarly ecstatic, though vague, likening the main character to, variously, Faust, Quasimodo, and Gunter Grass's Oskar Matzerath and seeing in the thirty-seven-year-old German author shades of Voltaire, de Sade, Umberto Eco, and the South American practitioners of "magic realism." With this introduction and the promise of a captivating mixture of historical novel, horror thriller, and fable of deep (if unspecified) import, the novel became at once a book club selection and a best seller.
From the opening page, the book fascinates as we follow the "gifted and abominable personage" who is its main character. In Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in 1738 to a Paris fishmonger beheaded for trying to do away with him, we meet a creature who inspires fear and loathing in nearly all who come near him, for the lacks a human smell. What he does possess is a superhuman ability to detect and recall every kind of odor: He is a prodigy of scents. Surviving on spite, the endures a mean upbringing from a miserly nurse (who has no sense of smell) and a brutal apparenticeship to a tanner - all the while living entirely in and for the pursuit and recollection of scents. As the tick lives for blood, we are told, Grenouille lives for smells, at first indiscriminately then for the monomaniacal pursuit of the master scent, the natural perfume of beautiful young women.
His obession entrances us as we follow his apprenticeship to a perfume maker, his bouts of horror at the realization he has no scent (hence no "self"), and especially his mad quest to capture and preserve the scent of the innocent and beautiful Laura, whose death would be for this moral idiot but an incidental detail in his perverse and consuming artistry. Crisply and lucidly written, suspenseful, and limited to this monster-artist's point of view, the novel holds the reader in a spell to the last page.
But what then? Having finished the book, one's suspicion grows that the novel has been a self-reflexive monstrosity. Just as Grenouille gains the power to mesmerize crowds through his perfumes so that they literally see before them a charming innocent instead of a conscienceless murderer, so this novel tricks us with its technical virtuosities into ignoring during its reading the chilling inhumanity as its core. A large measure of the reason we remain interested in, even well-disposed toward, Grenouille resides in the author's nasty portrayals of all the people with whom his main character has any dealings. His mother is a wretch, someone over whose execution we are asked to feel not the least pity. The nurse, his foster mother, is a greedy automaton, whose petty dreams the author gleefully shatters. The tanner is a brutish exploiter we are supposed to be happy to see drowned. Laura's father arrives to protect the life of his daughter only so that he can barter her for a fortune and a noble
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