Today it's our last travel through time and we are almost in the present. We want to review the book »Perfume: The Story of a Murderer« which was published in 1985. The German author Patrick Süskind tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a perfumer with a phenomenal olfaction who wants to become the greatest perfumer of all time and doesn't even shy at murder.
Patrick Süskind was born in 1949 in Germany. »Perfume: The Story of a Murderer« is the only book he has ever published and gained global success. It has been translated into 49 languages and more than 20 million copies were sold. Therefore it is one of the most famous German books that have ever been written. But Süskind is very reclusive and even refused many awards.
»He succeeded in being considered
totally uninteresting.
People left him alone.
And that was all he wanted.«
»He possessed the power. He held it in his hand.
A power stronger than
the power of money
or the power of terror or the power of death:
the
invincible power to command the love of mankind.
There was only one
thing that power could not do:
it could not make him able to smell
himself.«
»He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.«
The book is about the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who is born in the year 1738 with a perfect olfaction but no 'own smell'. Therefore the people are afraid of him even though they cannot explain it to themselves every time. Many think that the baby is possessed by the devil. The child is abandoned by his mother right after the birth and as an orphan he is humiliated by many people during his youth. When he grows up, Grenouille discovers that he can smell much more things than 'average' people. He can even walk around with his eyes closed and orientate himself just by the different scents. He is often annoyed about the fetidness in Paris where he lives but one day he meets a young girl with a breathtaking scent. He wants to possess it and kills the girl. That's why he decides that he has to become the greatest perfumer of all time. He starts an apprenticeship at one of the well-known perfumeries of Paris where he learns a lot about the techniques of a perfumer. But Grenouille wants to go further and tries to elicit the scent of material like iron and glass. After a few years he leaves the perfumery because he wants to go to Grasse where he can learn more. In Grasse he finds a girl that smells even better than the first one and he decides to create a perfume out of her. He is sure that this will give him power over everyone and that he will be accepted for the first time in his life. Even though he has to murder, he never stops following this aim.
The protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a strange and bestial person and we just couldn't like him even though we felt sorry for him. He is always described as 'simply evil' and that was something we couldn't get into our minds. We don't agree with the author about the fact that a person is born evil or good and so we had many discussions about this aspect of the book. But all in all Grenouille is a dislikable character who makes plenty of bad decisions. However, this is what makes the book so interesting. The reader gets drawn into Grenouille's crazy mind where murder makes sense and everything is allowed if it leads to a perfect result. We have to admit that it was very interesting to read the book from the point of view of a murderer who is so broken. The book really made us think about the motives of criminals and sometimes we really had
pity on Grenouille because he was treated badly by almost everybody. Of course
we know that a bad childhood is no excuse for murder and we sometimes
even felt like evil persons because we pitied a murderer.
We loved reading »Perfume: The Story of a Murderer« because it was fascinating and thrilling. We would definitely recommend it to you if you like stories about murderers that are complex and make you think a lot. The novel is quite brutal and you should be prepared to read about death and murder. We'll end this post now and just want to add that we hope you liked this little »Time travel through literature«.
Of course we only presented a few books but these were the ones we
really loved and which influenced the world of literature a lot. Maybe
we could do something like this again in the future if you want us to!
I hope I won't get any nightmares because of this story! ~Liv
And I don't want to time travel into Paris of the year 1738 anymore. ~Gwen
source: Wikipedia