EDITOR'S NOTE: I wrote this review back when I still trying to decide whether to approach a book review with gut feeling or discussing the plot itself. Unfortunately, I tipped too far in the latter direction, and give away almost everything in the book. Unless of course you love spoilers, please do not read this until you've read the book.



Like most babies smell like butter
His smell smelled like no other
He was born scentless and senseless
He was born a scentless apprentice


Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born on one of the smelliest days of the year in the downtrodden section of 18th century Paris. The combined scents of offal, fish, an overflowing cemetery with a pretty name, and a bustling, crowded, stinking summer market rife in the air. His mother, a fishmonger, has been having anonymous children for years. In the past, she has simply suffocated them in the trash and continued on with her work. But from such a cruel woman, a cruel child is bound to be born. And this one wants to survive. So he does, discovered in the trash when he begins to scream -- his mother sentenced to death for her negligible parenting. From the beginning, Grenouille is a person who knows no love.

He is shuttled from skittish wet nurses, to a monastery, to an orphanage/boarding house, where he will be raised after a fashion. The other children avoid him, and he avoids them. There is something not quite right about Grenouille -- and no one can exactly put their finger on what. Sure, he doesn't speak much, but then, neither do a lot of the children in the orphanage, under the care of a woman who treats the children not as potentials for love, but neat little names in a long list that will help her realize her dream, to die a private death in her old age. All the love closed out from her heart when she was struck across the bridge of her nose with an iron rod by her husband (now deceased). She has spent her life since taking care of children in order to make money, not to make connections. In her way, she is as dead as Grenouille. She is the only one who sees him as equal to the other children, an equal in a sea of anonymity, cost vs. return.


Every wet nurse refused to feed him
Electrolytes smell like semen
I promise not to sell your perfumed secrets
There are countless formulas for pressing flowers


Grenouille realizes very soon that he has been blessed with a terrible gift -- he has the best olefactory sense in the world. And I'm not talking just being able to tell the difference in scent between, say, the essence of jasmine and attar of roses from 20 paces. He can do that, yes, but so can most any perfumer who has honed his craft for long enough. That would be merely remarkable. No, Grenouille's nose is so attuned to the world that he can smell gradiations in people's emotions. He can smell a girl breathing in her room from forty blocks away. He can smell the open sea from the mountains. He can see into everyone's most secret heart, but no one can see into his -- a gray, clenched fist. What should bring him even deeper into the world instead distances and alienates him from it.

Once out of the orphanage, Grenouille starts work as a tanner's helper. It's horrible, tiring, soul-deadening work -- climbing into chemical baths, stripping fat from distended skin, burying pelts in the earth to cure -- but Grenouille doesn't seem to mind. He realizes that, with his gift, he is meant for great things. All he has to do is bide his time.

One day opportunity comes. Grenouille has cajoled his tanner boss into letting Grenouille deliver some goat skins to a perfumer in a fashionable part of Paris. This perfumer, Baldini, is a has-been. And -- his shameful secret -- even his once great perfumes, the past raves of Paris, were stolen recipes. Baldini, in his advancing age, decides it's time to call it quits. He finds an unexpected idyll in the decision, and feels lighter for the first time in years. There is a decided poeticism in his thoughts -- at peace, finally, with his professional decline. Then Grenouille, who has smelled all of this in Baldini, comes to the door.

Through false earnestness and conniving humility, he convinces Baldini to let him mix up a small batch of the leading competitor's perfume, note for note. Baldini acquiesces out of a combination of curiosity, contempt, humor and desperation, but immediately becomes infuriated when Grenouille starts mixing his batch without use of measuring tools. What a fool to let this young upstart try to create a perfume! When the perfume comes out, absolutely perfect, Baldini is beside himself.

"Let me make it better?" Grenouille asks.

Baldini, dumbstruck, nods his head. And Grenouille turns the dry, commercial perfume into a masterpiece. Baldini remembers a past tryst with a dark-haired girl, the moon coming through the windows off the sea, all through this scent. He falls to his knees.

And so, Grenouille becomes Baldini's apprentice. (soon after the transaction is made, Grenouille's former boss celebrates the night away with drunken carousing, and falls off a pier to his death) With these beautiful new scents, it's not long before all of Paris is buying Baldini's perfumes, pomades, tonics and sundries. His shop is paid court by the rich and royal, and he is able to start a factory outside of Paris that breaks trade laws, but since he has gotten in good with the upper crust, it's not a problem. Grenouille never takes credit for Baldini's perfumes, each one a subtle refinement and reinvention. To him, his perfumes are just combinations of the scents in his head; experiments, and nothing more. Emotional reaction is besides the point in someone like Grenouille. He has no interest in being a tastemaker, or being known for his art. All he asks is to learn the process of distillation. Or, as he thinks of it, stealing the soul of a flower and making it his own. Soon, he will move beyond flowers. He will smell a beautiful virgin on the cusp of womanhood, and take her life. This heady aroma he will hold onto for the rest of his life -- it will give him his crooked course.


I lie in the soil and fertilize mushrooms
Leaking out gas fumes are made into perfume
You can't fire me because I quit!
Throw me in the fire and I won't throw a fit


Once Grenouille is finished learning everything he can from Baldini, he gets his journeyman's papers and starts for a new village, already weary of the idea of having to work through the ranks to become a perfumer. While Baldini sleeps in his well-furnished house, content with all of his dreams and successes, the section of the bridge his quarters sit on tumbles into the sea. In the same way Grenouille's tanner boss expired, so does Baldini. It's as though a supernatural force is burning up at both ends. There are no stray cords to tie up -- they just cease to be.

Grenouille realizes that his contempt for humanity, their awful, loutish stink, is too strong. He cannot go through the motions of becoming a master perfumer. Desperately, he uses his nose to guide him as far away from humanity as possible. At the outskirts of a dead volcano, that not even bandits go near, Grenouille finds his peace. He holes up in the ground for seven years, eating only what comes too near his cave, and dreaming of scents, most orgiastically of the murdered girl's. He is content in his grave.

But a nightmare strikes him and rouses him. He realizes, for the time time in his 25 years of existence, that he has no scent himself. This moment of self-realization strikes a crushing blow to his ego. How can he, the great Grenouille, not have his own marker, his own presence, his own place in the world? Even more alarming, how could he have never noticed this about himself before now?

He reenters the world, and immediately becomes a scientific sensation. How could someone have survived for so long eating next to nothing and living in a cave? A particularly eccentric duke takes a shine to Grenouille, thinking he can prove one of his pet theories on invisible earth gas. To make a long story short, Grenouille gives this duke his long sought-after acclaim by agreeing to be a guineau pig for his treatments and experiments. At the end of it, Grenouille will leave with smart new clothes and pockets full of money, and the duke will end up perishing, climbing naked up a mountain, obsessed with the idea of cleansing his body of any remaining traces of earth gas. He becomes a patron saint of the esoteric, and the deluded.

And so Grenouille ends his strange, messy journey in the mountain town of Grasse, where most of the flowers used in Paris' perfume are harvested. Grenouille will become an apprentice to a widower and her soon-to-be-next husband, learning the art of pressing flowers into oil to extract their essences. He will scent an aroma on the air so powerful that it shoves the murdered girl's memory aside. From this discovery, the town beauty -- a beauty of the world -- named Laure will become the centerpiece of Grenouille's new perfume. It will need some balance of course, and Grenouille will find it in the death-scents of 24 other local beauties. When he unveils this perfume to the world, the results will destroy him. And then he will destroy himself.

I'll acknowledge the elephant in the room. Kurt Cobain wrote a song about this book, and it was through that song, Scentless Apprentice (quoted in italics), that I was led to this story. It is an alarming and eye-opening read, especially near the end, when the satire is at its funniest and cruelest, and the town of Grasse, only moments before ready to massacre Grenouille for his murders, suddenly wants to embrace him, wants to take him, wants to be him ... and they fall into an orgy of religious bliss and physical fumblings. It's hard not to imagine that this is how Kurt viewed his celebrity, with the final, awful close of the book the clarion call of his own death, a sympathetic ear.

Patrick Suskind, of course, didn't know any of this when the book was published in 1985. In his favor, he has written a seductive novel (translated from the original German) that is also deeply haunting and corruscating. Told through Grenouille, love is a delusion, and people its willing cattle. But that is the aim of the book's satire, and shouldn't be misconstrued as truth. All fairy tales have their precepts and their flaws. This one will move you and make you think, even as it seems to be closing around you like a Venus fly trap. I cannot recommend this book enough. Your sensibilities will be scrambled, and you'll never take something as biological and primal as scent for granted again.

Recommended: Yes