Perfume by Patrick Suskind – T. rex Had a Great Sense of Smell
Patrick Suskind’s 1985 novel Perfume is one of the 20th century’s best selling German novels, winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the PEN Translation Prize for the English edition by John Woods. It’s about an eighteenth century Parisian man, born with a superhuman sense of smell, and a lack of any normal moral sense. He will stop at nothing in his efforts to make the world’s greatest perfume.
I will tell you right away that this is a weird and dark book, its creepiness deriving from the fact that we are in the realm of smell. Smell, as I have learned with a bit of background reading, is the most ancient of senses, evolving from the primeval ability of early life forms to understand the chemical make-up of their environment.
A book set in an aromatic world is in tricky territory because reading is a visual, or auditory, experience. A ‘smell book’ would be very revealing in some ways, reaching places that the other senses could not, while also having the ability to trigger all sorts of emotions and memories. But the structure of the narrative would be all over the place. Smells linger and merge. Chapter one might not really end on its last page, but potentially persist into all the chapters that come after. And the last chapter could very well waft into the first. Also the book would be very short on thought and analysis. You smell things like manure and roses, not justice or the law. Old books smell, literature does not. We are talking something elemental here, which does not recognise abstractions. Smell is like an ancient world, which survives into the present day as a kind of Jurassic Park. Actually, the novel Perfume could be compared to that film – a fanciful portrayal of a reborn primeval force, sometimes beautiful, often scary and violent, with a terrifying T. rex central character who cannot be confined, despite the cheery confidence of Richard Attenborough. Very interesting, but approach with caution, and don’t expect to find the experience entirely pleasant.
