Product Description

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brillance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

Translated from the German by John E. Woods.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53816 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-07
• Released on: 2006-11-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
"A fable of crimial genius.... Remarkable." —The New York Times

"Mesmerizing from first page to last.... A highly sophisticated horror tale." —The Plain Dealer

"A supremely accomplished work of art, marvelously crafted and enjoyable and rich in historical detail." —The San Francisco Chronicle

"An original and astonishing novel." —People

"An ingenious story...about a most exotic monster.... Suspense build up steadily." —Los Angeles Times

"Immensely seductive.... Storytelling at its best." —The Kansas City Star

About the Author
Patrick Süskind was born in Ambach, near Munich, in 1949. He studied medieval and modern history at the University of Munich. His first play, The Double Bass, was written in 1980 and became an international success. It was performed in Germany, in Switzerland, at the Edinburgh Festival, in London, and at the New Theatre in Brooklyn. His first novel, Perfume became an internationally acclaimed bestseller. He is also the author of The Pigeon and Mr. Summer's Story, and a coauthor of the enormously successful German television series Kir Royal. Mr. Süskind lives and writes in Munich.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1

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. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name-in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade's, for instance, or Saint-Just's, Fouch?'s, Bonaparte's, etc.-has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, to wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.

And of course the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city of France. And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench: between the rue aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie, the Cimeti?re des Innocents to be exact. For eight hundred years the dead had been brought here from the H?tel-Dieu and from the surrounding parish churches, for eight hundred years, day in, day out, corpses by the dozens had been carted here and tossed into long ditches, stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years in the tombs and charnel houses. Only later-on the eve of the Revolution, after several of the grave pits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen graveyard's neighbors to more than mere protest and to actual insurrection-was it finally closed and abandoned. Millions of bones and skulls were shoveled into the catacombs of Montmartre and in its place a food market was erected.

Here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born on July 17, 1738. It was one of the hottest days of the year. The heat lay leaden upon the graveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapor, a blend of rotting melon and the fetid odor of burnt animal horn, out into the nearby alleys. When the labor pains began, Grenouille's mother was standing at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted. The fish, ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell masked the odor of corpses. Grenouille's mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility to sensate impressions. She only wanted the pain to stop, she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths, for the bloody meat that emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already, nor had lived much longer, and by evening the whole mess had been shoveled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river. It would be much the same this day, and Grenouille's mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and-except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption-suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a widower with a trade or some such to bear real children . . . Grenouille's mother wished that it were already over. And when the final contractions began, she squatted down under the gutting table and there gave birth, as she had done four times before, and cut the newborn thing's umbilical cord with her butcher knife. But then, on account of the heat and the stench, which she did not perceive as such but only as an unbearable, numbing something-like a field of lilies or a small room filled with too many daffodils-she grew faint, toppled to one side, fell out from under the table into the street, and lay there, knife in hand.

Tumult and turmoil. The crowd stands in a circle around her, staring, someone hails the police. The woman with the knife in her hand is still lying in the street. Slowly she comes to.

What has happened to her?

"Nothing."

What is she doing with that knife?

"Nothing."

Where does the blood on her skirt come from?

"From the fish."

She stands up, tosses the knife aside, and walks off to wash.

And then, unexpectedly, the infant under the gutting table begins to squall. They have a look, and beneath a swarm of flies and amid the offal and fish heads they discover the newborn child. They pull it out. As prescribed by law, they give it to a wet nurse and arrest the mother. And since she confesses, openly admitting that she would definitely have let the thing perish, just as she had with those other four by the way, she is tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a few weeks later decapitated at the place de Gr?ve.

By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. No one wanted to keep it for more than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucked as much as two babies, deprived the other sucklings of milk and them, the wet nurses, of their livelihood, for it was impossible to make a living nursing just one babe. The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, instantly wearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway house for foundlings and orphans at the far end of the rue Saint-Antoine, from which transports of children were dispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. But since these convoys were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants were placed at a time; since therefore the mortality rate on the road was extraordinarily high; since for that reason the porters were urged to convey only baptized infants and only those furnished with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; since the babe Grenouille had neither been baptized nor received even so much as a name to inscribe officially on the certificate of transport; since, moreover, it would not have been good form for the police anonymously to set a child at the gates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to dodge the other formalities . . . thus, because of a whole series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties that seemed likely to occur if the child were shunted aside, and because time was short as well, officer La Fosse revoked his original decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution or other, so that there they could baptize him and decide his further fate. He got rid of him at the cloister of Saint-Merri in the rue Saint-Martin. There they baptized him with the name Jean-Baptiste. And because on that day the prior was in a good mood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they did not have the child shipped to Rouen, but instead pampered him at the cloister's expense. To this end, he was given to a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint-Denis and was to receive, until further notice, three francs per week for her trouble.

2

A few weeks later, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie stood, market basket in hand, at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri, and the minute they were opened by a bald monk of about fifty with a light odor of vinegar about him-Father Terrier-she said "There!" and set her market basket down on the threshold.

"What's that?" asked Terrier, bending down over the basket and sniffing at it, in the hope that it was something edible.

"The bastard of that woman from the rue aux Fers who killed her babies!"

The monk poked about in the basket with his finger till he had exposed the face of the sleeping infant.

"He looks good. Rosy pink and well nourished."

"Because he's stuffed himself on me. Because he's pumped me dry down to the bones. But I've put a stop to that. Now you can feed him yourselves with goat's milk, with pap, with beet juice. He'll gobble up anything, that bastard will."

Father Terrier was an easygoing man. Among his duties was the administration of the cloister's charities, the distribution of its moneys to the poor and needy. And for that he expected a thank-you and that he not be bothered further. He despised technical details, because details meant difficulties and difficulties meant ruffling his composure, and he simply would not put up with that. He was upset that he had even opened the gate. He wished that this female would take her m...

Customer Reviews

A Surprisingly interesting, unique story and character.
I first heard of this novel in conjunction with the release of the movie "Perfume" and after reading some complimentary material from Roger Ebert about the original written work (translated from the German) I decided to give this story a try. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story itself is very accessible & well written, and that the murders described on the book jacket are not where Suskind turns his graphic focus. Grenouille (sp?), the murderer, is a unique character. He is blessed (cursed?) with an incredible sense of smell and the ability to store any scent he encounters in the vaults of his memory for repeated enjoyment later. Think of him as a "scent savant." Furthermore, he has no smell of his own - no body odor, nothing. After surviving a less-than-ideal birth and subsequent rearing at the hands of wetnurses, monks, and tanners, He becomes an apprentice perfume maker and helps his mentor become one of the most popular perfumers in France by using his unique gifts to create evocative perfumes that dazzle the senses and sell for great sums of money. However, as Grenouille learns the perfumer's art we learn that his motives are suspect - scent is all he is concerned with, and he wants to learn to distill and extract odors of living things and objects, not just flowers and other plants used in perfuming. From there, the book follows G's relationship with scent and how he covets the life essence of young women, leading to a self-initiated hermitage, subsequent murder spree, and eventually a spectacular resolution of the plot. If you are wary of this book because you are not one who wants to read about graphic mutilations and "CSI" like corpse descriptions, then by all means don't worry. The murders are not the story...the character, his magnificent skill, and the progression of his life is the story. As the book jacket states, G kills over two dozen women...but not a corpse nor a murderous act is described in detail in the bunch, and this all happens in the last quarter of the novel, basically on just a few pages out of hundreds. If you can stomach "He then strangled her," then you've just read an example of how the murders are typically presented. Instead, we learn about how the scents relate to his thoughts and his motives and we learn how such a man came to the decisions he made. The finale, which I will not ruin here, seems unbelievable...but based on what we've learned in the preceding pages it makes sense and brings the story to a fantastic and memorable close. If you are looking for a unique "book club" book that will lead to interesting discussion, and a break from Nora Roberts, Michael Connelly, or Oprah's book club, then male and female readers alike might want to give it a look. It might not knock your socks off, but there is enough there to make it worth the time.

Beautiful and eloquent
I read Perfume on a recommendation by Esquire. The storyline captivated me, and I ordered it right away. Let me first say that I've never really considered myself a fan of period pieces. I find usually the language is too hard to follow fluidly, being that modern English is far different than Old English. I really needn't have had reservations, because as soon as I picked this book up I fell deeply into the story, the character and all the stunning visuals it invoked in my mind. I felt as if I were there. Further, the story is so amazingly imaginative that not only did I love Perfume, I knew I had to read other things written by Suskind (of which there is very little). Reading reviews from other people who say this book was terrible is pretty perplexing to me, and I have to attribute that to people who cannot fathom letting themselves into the deranged mind of the main character or his motives, or who just don't understand the story. After reading it I was thrilled to find they were making a movie (which never made an appearance in my hometown, so I had to wait for DVD), and surprisingly found they were amazingly close in depicting the feeling and perplexity of the story.

Disturbing
This is definately a good book, but I wouldn't recommend it for my mother. There are many slow parts, that's for sure, for it seems the author knows what he's talking about and goes into detail, which is actually very fascinating if you're patient enough to read it all. I must admit I will probably never read this book again, for it is incredibly disturbing. It is, for the most part, told from the main character's (Jean-Baptiste) point of view, who is the murderer. Call me crazy but it's the first time I've been able to understand and empathize with a cold-blooded murderer, that's how well the author goes into this character's head. You hate him and feel sorry for him at the same time. It was a good experience for me. This book will make you think, and for me, it made me wonder how in the world I myself can rise above mediocrity, for the author makes human beings seem completely stupid, and I just pray I'm not someone who'd fall into one of Jean-Baptiste's traps. Trust me, you will put down the book at the very end, completely sickened and disturbed, and left thinking very deeply (or trying not to). It's worth the ride if you can handle it. Read it!