Perfume The Story Of A Murderer By Patrick Suskind

 

The novel exhibits paramount power of smell, as the ultimate invisible agent in channelling emotions, and the same power used to befool humans and victimise them, as we all perceive smell with our senses before discerning it with our own mind!

It is a perfect psychological thriller, inundated with the gamut of smells! 😊

 

This could have easily ended-up being one of my longest reviews, but tried my level best to make it as succinct as possible! I openly divulge, it was outrightly daunting to review a novel of this gigantic amplitude, expounding on themes beyond my creative contemplation!

 

Patrick Suskind, had done his deep-research on all olfactory senses and scents, on the power of dreams, on cold-hearted and greed-driven evil. Above all, he astutely drove his protagonist on a pathway to acquire godlike omniscient powers, thus leading to a tragic end!

 

It is an epic tale about the journey of Jean Baptiste Grenouille, the most gifted and abominable personage in the 18^th century France, when all the streets, marketplaces and atmosphere smelled fiendishly with the effluvia and putrefying vapors from sewers, decaying life and stale animal droppings!

It is his story of abysmal evil while on the quest of inventing one of the world’s most exotic perfumes.

My personal sense of smell was utterly dulled, my tummy ached, and the pain deadened all susceptibility to sensate impersonation, post reading the 18^th century abject, abysmal and rotten smells seething, mingling and impregnating Paris, in the opening novel.

Patrick was a Wordsmith of senses in delineating while cleverly intertwining them with a plot beyond anyone’s contemplation. Though, ongoing comprehension was thrilling and full of fragrance! 😊

Patrick Suskind easily proved his mettle as the KING of  “the human olfactory senses”!

He ostensibly describes, the urge and want of heavenly bliss, by the French, helping them to transcend from the abysmal abject pungent reality of the 18^th century into a subtle realm surrounded by seraphim and exotic fragrance!

Patrick, astutely sets up the tempo for us readers, to mentally let go the temporal reality, and be ready to travel with him vicariously into a realm of sheer and sensual placidity, using only one tool , and that is – our acute sense of SMELL!

Since my own childhood, apart from the picturesque memory, I personally basked in the power of smell, as the superlative agent to channel and mold my own emotions and wishes.

 

Without any further ado and divergence, let me dive into a very basic/superficial abridged novel summary (without spoilers)-

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The infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born with a sublime majestic gift of “an absolute sense of smell”! Traversing through all the atrocities of childhood, he grows into deciphering all the odors of Paris, and apprentices with an eminent perfumer, who mentors him with the ancient art of mixing and distilling aromatic herbs, precious oils, flowers, woods, seeds and everything that can render into a heavenly smell and bliss! 😊

But the obsessive and ambitious Grenouille is unstoppable and boisterous, and becomes all the more consumed with capturing smells of objects like brass doorknobs, fresh cut-wood and the like.

One fine day, he catches a hint and tinge of scent that drives him onto the most perturbing and terrifying quest of creating “The ultimate perfume” of the scent of a beautiful young virgin! What follows is a series of murders and sensual depravity and perversion! What follows is profane and sacrilegious.

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It is tale told with majestic brilliance, leaving the readers captivated, intoxicated with words and smells, in complete awe!

Suskind, has very cleverly used means to unveil how human senses can be easily dulled and eluded by a mere whiff of an exhilarating smell!

He endows the protagonist not only with a captivating and magical sense of smell, but also arms him with a destructive obsession, that sets the plot into motion.

Grenouille, doesn’t view the world, with eyes but through smell! In short, his soul feeds on smells of all kinds, and in deprivation, it hungers more and sets-out onto more precarious deadly obsession!

With an isolated abandoned childhood, mayhem and death follows, wherever Grenouille goes! The revelation, that scents are not immortal or permanent, and that they cannot be preserved, incites and ignites the murderer instincts in Grenouille! His sole ambition in his life, now confines just to “preserve the human scent”

It sounds cannibalistic, but no scent lures him, not even the ones concocted in the laboratory, but only human scent!

He is never disconcerted or unnerved, butchering bodies, just to intoxicate himself with the scents gathered. That’s ghastly and obnoxious.

Suskind has shrewdly balanced the softness and delicacy of the topic of perfumes with the mayhem and dismemberment of destructive obsession!

The protagonist lacks on sentiments and human emotions, his diabolical obsession takes precedence!

All the hurdles and obstacles faced in concocting the perfume, ends up concocting his own END!

 

My verdict- “perfumed-4-stars”. Subtracted a star, due to my lack of grasping it in entirety in my first read. It is profusely-laden with smells and vocabulary, which I couldn’t register in totality, might add on the missing star, post my re-read and hoarding it all! 😊

 

It is a perfumed, artfully crafted psychological thriller, that inebriates and stupefies not only the reader’s sense of smell but vision too, with the artful usage of words!

It is a masterwork of heavenly artistic conception and flawless execution. An extravagantly gripping page-turner. A thrilling and compelling story of a man with a magical sense of smell but with a bewilderingly and bizarrely destructive obsession, that leads to the flawless execution of the novel in the most illuminating, outlandish, incredible and intoxicating manner, which takes over your mass and bones and leaves you craving for all the more!

I was left inebriated for a good enough time, ofcourse in a good way! :-D

 

Unsolicited advise – Anyone lacking on olfactory senses, without any further delay pick up this novel!

Anyone lacking on adventure in life, without a second thought pickup this novel!

 

I don’t know how I am ought to smell, but currently I smell of all the mystery and awe, post the thrilling and chilling read!

 

There is again a gargantuan truckload of quotes, so battled my way out to pick up a few (without disrespect to the ones I couldn’t pick):-

 

“The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.”

 

“The cry that followed his birth, the cry with which he had brought himself to people’s attention and his mother to the gallows, was not an instinctive cry for sympathy and love. That cry, emitted upon careful consideration, one might almost say upon mature consideration, was the newborn’s decision against love and nevertheless for life.”

 

“Which is why the façon de parler speaks of that universe as a landscape; an adequate expression, to be sure, but the only possible one, since our language is of no use when it comes to describing the smellable world”

 

THIS IS MY ALL-TIME FAVORTITE:-

 

“We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some—more spectacularly—squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer to God. Their solitude is a self-mortification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind. Grenouille’s case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance nor waiting for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.”

 

 

“What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love. These were his victims.”