Perfume the only novel of Patrick Suskind's available in an English translation is a perennially decent seller. If you see it on the shelf today, it's packaged as a slick looking trade paperback (that's the bigger paperback that usually costs between twelve and sixteen dollars), which for all purposes looks like a good novel. If my memory serves me right there are even impressive sounding blurbs telling the potential reader it's a good novel. I didn't read the nice looking version of the novel, I read the mass market (that's the little paperback you find in grocery stores) version from the late 80's. Instead of being packaged as serious literature it looks like pulp horror, with a menacing cover and the words shocking and murderer prominently placed on the cover. The covers also blood red. In short it looks like a horror novel from the 80's. Strangely though it contains many blurbs on it proclaiming its greatness (possibly the same blurbs that are still on the book, I don't know). Two of the blurbs read, "Beautifully researched... Brilliant and the other "Mr. Suskind himself is a perfumer of language... A remarkable debut. The first blurb comes from Mr. Rabbitt himself, John Updike; the second from the New York Times Book Review.

I'll come back the reviews later.

So, I had my hands on this cheap looking horror novel with cream of the crop reviewers' blurbs praising it to the heavens and I dove in to it expecting the best.

Plot

I give away parts of the plot an inattentive reader may not guess for themselves

The books about a French guy in the 18th century. He's born a bastard and is raised by a variety of people. He has one remarkable gift he keeps to himself; he can smell really good. His sense of smell is so good that he remembers everything he smells and can detect lingering odors from miles away. He also finds odors in objects one normally does not detect any in. Eventually he forces his way into an apprenticeship at a failing perfumer, where he turns the business around by being able to come up with new scents that the public goes crazy about (see a feeble attempt at critiquing the pre-capitalist society and the nascent seeds of the spectacle). When his apprenticeship ends he goes off wandering, shuns humanity (why? Basically because people smell bad, the reasons never given for his psychological change) for a few years (and develops a god complex) and then goes on his quest to learn new and more refined ways of capturing the scent of objects.

See, the man is obsessed with learning how to capture the smell a virgin girl has when she is on the cusp between being a child and an adult. Supposedly it's a wonderful smell that in its concentrate would drive the world crazy with lust. Ok, it sounds sort of silly but I'll accept it in the context of this fantastical plot.

Our protagonist finds the method of stealing the scent from the newly dead and sets off to kill (but we don't get the gruesome killings, so much for his being a horror novel) a bunch of girls to get their smell. Then some more stuff happens and the book is over.

Review

The book has the makings of being an interesting story, unfortunately the brilliant language the esteemed critics praised was not present. Instead the novel's dragged down by long sentences that read like grocery lists and every decent allusion killed off by a declarative sentence immediately explaining the allusion. For example, over and over again the book makes a comment that the main character could move swiftly in the dark, because he could smell the objects around him. Explaining this point once is fine, but the author chooses to give the smell explanation every single time the character can deftly maneuver. There are only so many times that I need to be told the character has a good sense of smell. It's not like I could forget that fact, since it's the premise of the whole novel. Basically the language and its usage drove me up the wall.

Besides the language the novel failed on just about every other level I can think of. I would like to agree with Updike and say it was brilliantly researched, but except for giving detailed explanations about how to make perfume I didn't find anything in the book that seemed to be arcanely historical (this same information is given in Tom Robbins Jitterbug Perfume I don't know which novel came first and maybe having read Robbins novel I just wasn't impressed with Suskind's knowledge of perfumes). Most of the time the period the story took place and the places could be substituted for any time period and it would not have changed a thing about the book. At times the beautifully researched work falls into shoddy dialogue filled with modern day Americanisms (this could the translator's fault) that no one in their right mind could believe to be historically accurate. The places described in the book have very little detail, except that apparently big cities in 18th century France smelled pretty bad. We do get descriptions of clothes that could be taken from any period piece of this nature and a few characters are involved in certain humanist vogue enlightenment fads. The reader is given the name dropping of luminary Frenchmen of the time, but honestly does naming Diderot and Rousseau really constitute 'brilliant research'? If so then I too am a master of mid 18th century France. I'm not though.

Ok, so far I'm not happy about the language and I don't think the research is stellar. What about the plot? Well it's fine if you like your suspenseful stories lacking in suspense. The author gives away all the plot twists (except for the moronic ending, which there is no way you'll ever see coming) long before the event unfolds. In the story too the reader is given a helping of a 'humanity is sh*t' philosophy that I guess is supposed to stand in opposition to the humanist trends of the time. I don't really know where Suskind was going with this critique of humanity, but he returns to it over and over again. But then again most of the plot deep down has no meaning or reason.

That leaves one last aspect of the book. It's pacing. This is supposedly a page-turner. Yes, that is true, but it's only because it's very simple to read. The novel never once grabbed me and made me want to read on to find out what was going to happen. I knew up until the last three pages what was going to happen next. I read the book quickly, but the pacing itself stunk. For example ten percent of the book is devoted to describing in way too much detail the life of the master perfumer the future murderer studies under. Why is it too much detail? Because he's not an important character, he's a tool to give the main character the skills needed to commit his vicious crimes. Who cares about everything the man believes, what purpose does it serve to give a detailed explanation of how he came to have his knowledge. Maybe this is one of the brilliantly researched parts of the book, but it doesn't matter. The chapters devoted to him should have been cut out. Once the main character enters his life, he is there to sit back and watch while passing a few tidbits of information to him. Once the main character leaves, he dies (like everyone seems to once the main character leaves their life). He's not very important, but yet his background makes up over thirty of the 310 pages of the book. The novel does this to other characters too. It takes up undue space with information that could be delivered to the reader in less than half the space.

Want to know the percent of the book given to the actual murders? About five percent, and in only one percent does Suskind write with any kind of brutality, or describe the murder itself, or the incidents leading up to a murder (well actually with the information leading up to it maybe three percent of the book, 10 pages).

Conclusion

I'm probably just being a snob in hating this book. I found nothing of worth besides some mindless entertainment, and it wasn't even that entertaining. I would recommend this book to someone looking for a light crime novel, but not for anyone looking for the goods promised in the blurbs. I can't help but believe that the book's popularity lies upon the fact that it's German. By being a foreign novel it must be good (similar to the view that everything with subtitles must be arty and thus good). I hope that Suskind is not representative of the current literary state from the country that breed Goethe, Brecht, Grass, Holderlin and Mann (too name a few). Unfortunately though I can't bring to mind any other contemporary German Authors who have made it to the US shores lately.

Recommended: No