I was worried about reading this book because I don’t like murders and vicious scenes. Yet, this book is not like that all. Yes, there are murders all twenty-four of them plus two extras, but they are not gory. In fact, most of the book is about perfumes and perfume making.

In the story, Jean Baptiste Grenouille is actually a gifted person with an acute sense of smell, although he himself lacks any odor. Grenouille is the bastard son of a fishmonger who is executed, leaving Grenouille to be raised by a disturbed woman until the age of eight, after which he is given to a tanner for an apprenticeship, who makes him work too hard. There he contracts anthrax but somehow survives it. Then he manages to get himself accepted as a worker for a perfumer where he learns a few things about perfume-making. In the meantime, he walks around collecting the perfumes of the city inside his mind, since he never forgets an odor. His first murder is because of the most inspiring scent coming from an adolescent girl.

This is only the beginning of his journey through life, in which he seeks to find an odor for himself since he lacks one. He can also invent scents that appeal to other people and scents that can create different emotions in them, and he kills in order to create an ideal perfume from human bodies.

The action in the rest of the story, readers have to read the book to find out for themselves.

The time of the story is eighteenth-century France. The settings as to places are interesting, too. The story begins in Paris, turns to the caves, then to the south of France and back to Paris. All these places, the readers experience through the eyes and the olfactory sense of the main character.

I found this book to be a very important one because it points to the weaknesses of people, being an outcast, the significance of the subconscious, truth, and superficiality. The passion of the main character for scents, his aptitude, is the driving force throughout the book, and the ending is especially poignant. I suspect for Jean Baptiste Grenouille, perfume symbolizes the love of life, which at the end, turns into hate for life.

The other characters, which are numerous, are shown not fully but according to the degree they help the main storyline. In that, they perform like parodies of society.

Is Jean Baptiste Grenouille a common, wicked murderer? This is a question I kept asking myself while I read the book, even though most of the murders happened toward the end of the book. I think Grenouille was too self-important and too passionate about scents, but he didn’t kill for the sake of killing like every other murderer. Still, he lived life for himself alone and that stance made his life meaningless and detestable.

finding out that there are many ways of looking at an event or a situation.

the underlying idea of the book showing how important a positive personal identity is for any one person.

awed at the author's thinking/daring for he went to places where most any writer wouldn't dare to step on.

is Patrick Suskind, a German author who lives in Munich.

I believe it is important for a writer to learn from even if s/he doesn't like the genre, plot, or any other aspect of the book.

I understand this book was made into a movie. That took me by surprise. I can't wrap my head around how the internal stuff of the main character that goes on, the passionate searching for creating perfumes to mimic human emotions and personalities, can be shown on screen.

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Vintage International)   from Amazon.Com!

Created May 09, 2019 at 8:42pm • Submit your own review...