I can’t recall who recommended Perfume to me, but it was awhile ago. I ended up, for some reason, reading the Emperor of Scent instead (a non-fiction book about a scientist with a controversial theory of scent). But recently I came across Perfume in a library and picked it up. Perfume, by Patrick Suskind and translated from the German by John E. Woods (I figure with any book where the style is conspicuous, the translator also deserves mention), is the story of a genius perfumer and serial killer, set in 1700s pre-Revolutionary France, and the prose simultaneously flows free and displays both sumptuousness and precision. As I said before, this story is working without a net, as it is essentially a portrait of the sociopathic, inhuman protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille; normally a monster has a foil, but while there are other characters, Grenouille is the one whom we follow around, and whose consciousness is the most dissected. The story is not, really, precisely a realistic one, considering the extremes of the powers of scent Grenouille possess, but the setting is realistically conceived (having read much of this period of French history, I especially enjoyed the details), but takes on a highly… literary? quality, the sense of construction rather than a transparent style of simple description, through the sort of diction used in the text. What’s also notable are the descriptions of the alchemical processes of perfumery (which will probably be of interest to all you BPAL fans out there) and the perverse theories of human behavior implied in the tale.

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