Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (German: Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders [das paʁˈfœ̃ː diː ɡəˈʃɪçtə ˈʔaɪnəs ˈmœʁdɐs] (listen)) is a 1985 literary historical fantasy novel by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meanings that scents may have.
The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th-century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell, capable of distinguishing a vast range of scents in the world around him. Grenouille becomes a perfumer but later becomes involved in murder when he encounters a young girl with an unsurpassed wondrous scent.
With translations into 49 languages and more than 20 million copies sold worldwide to date, Perfume is one of the best-selling German novels of the 20th century. The title remained in bestseller lists for about nine years and received almost unanimously positive national and international critical …
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (German: Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders [das paʁˈfœ̃ː diː ɡəˈʃɪçtə ˈʔaɪnəs ˈmœʁdɐs] (listen)) is a 1985 literary historical fantasy novel by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meanings that scents may have.
The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th-century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell, capable of distinguishing a vast range of scents in the world around him. Grenouille becomes a perfumer but later becomes involved in murder when he encounters a young girl with an unsurpassed wondrous scent.
With translations into 49 languages and more than 20 million copies sold worldwide to date, Perfume is one of the best-selling German novels of the 20th century. The title remained in bestseller lists for about nine years and received almost unanimously positive national and international critical acclaim. It was translated into English by John E. Woods and won both the World Fantasy Award and the PEN Translation Prize in 1987. Some editions of the novel, including the first, have as their cover image Antoine Watteau's painting, Jupiter and Antiope, which depicts a sleeping woman. In one of his last interviews, Kurt Cobain cited this book as his favorite, noting he had read it about ten times.
I often catch up with books years after their first publishing and any hype has faded. I remember Perfume was huge for a while but, having now read it, I'm struggling to understand why. Perhaps the John E Woods translation I borrowed just didn't do the original justice?
I did appreciate the olfactory descriptions at the beginning. This is an unusual concept for a novel so it was nicely different. However our protagonist, Jean-Baptiste, is such a blank person that caring about his story was impossible and so my interest in the writing's other aspects faded as fast as one of his perfumes.
