Patrick suskind biography perfume reviews
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
Opening sentence: “In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.”
When I posted a picture of this book on Instagram last week and mentioned that I had started to read it, I was taken aback by the overwhelming response! Perfume holds a special place in a lot of people’s reading history, so many said they loved it and now, I would have to agree with them.
Perfume catapults us into the world of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. A most unusual man – born with no natural scent of his own, but with a nose that can identify any smell for miles around. He is a fascinating, insular character, who has a sinister air around him at all times and is essentially highly unlikeable. And yet – you can’t help but want to find out more about him and discover his story.
The sub-title of th
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This book fryst vatten without doubt one of the most extraordinary novels of the late twentieth century. It was first published in the original German in 1985, and published in English the following year. It has sold over twenty million copies worldwide and been translated into 49 different languages. It won numerous prizes, remained on the bestseller lists in Germany for many years and was universally acclaimed. Despite this, its author published only a handful of other works (Perfume was his second book) and virtually retired from literary life in the mid-1990s and now, in his seventies, lives as a recluse between Germany and France, shunning all publicity. None of this surprises me; this book has surely to be the product of a very unusual mind.
The book begins in mid-eighteenth century Paris when the central character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born beneath a fish stall, to an indigent mother. She pauses her work briefly in order to give birth to him but then, believing or perhaps wi
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PERFUME The Story of a Murderer. By Patrick Suskind. Translated by John E. Woods. 255 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $16.95.
PATRICK SUSKIND'S novel is a book of smells - the odors of history, in fact - and on the first page 18th-century Paris is anatomized into its component stinks. In its most fetid spot, beside a mephitic cemetery and beneath a fish stall, the hero of ''Perfume,'' Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born. But the point, the miraculous point, is that he has no smell at all. He is an orphan whose absence of body odor turns him, also, into an outcast - both damned and blessed, pariah and magician.
Grenouille himself is haunted by smells. He recognizes the odors of separate stones and of the varieties of water; he can locate even the most tremulous perfume from miles away; he can separate the simplest stench into its various elements - that of a human being, for example, being composed of cat feces, cheese and vinegar. As a child and young