Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind takes place in 18th-century France and is about a serial killer named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who uses his hyper-olfactory sense to hunt his victims, all of whom are beautiful young females. After a disgustingly poetic in-depth outline of the way the streets of Paris would have smelled during the late 1700s, the reader is introduced to Jean-Baptiste as a baby: a naked newborn who has been abandoned by his unwed mother. A female passerby takes pity on the child and delivers him to a convent, where the boy spends the brunt of his childhood. It is here that other characters realize his extraordinary sense of smell. However, this gift is not nurtured and he is sold for nearly nothing to be a dockworker.
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Several years later Jean-Baptiste's talent is discovered by a perfumer named Baldini, who teaches him all there is to know about the business of making perfume. It doesn't take long for Jean-Baptiste to learn the ins and outs of the trade, and he soon turns Baldini into the most renowned perfumer in all of Paris, creating the most divine scents. Around this period of time, Jean-Baptiste catches a smell unlike anything he's ever experienced, the smell of a beautiful, young woman. In somewhat of a trance, he follows the woman and accidentally kills her (he suffocates her when she lets out a scream of fright due to his loitering presence). When she is dead, her heavenly scent quickly dissipates. He then spends most of his time trying to figure out a way capture the scent of beautiful women. Ultimately, he does this by killing them, stripping them, spreading lard all over their skin, and then collecting the lard so that he can boil it down into its purest form: a few heavenly drops of the woman's scent captured in an oil.
He leaves Baldini in order to search the countryside for the fairest of women. He kills twelve of them in total and, indeed, creates the perfect scent. With a single drop, he turns an everyday square of people into a lovesick orgy. He thinks this will make him happy, but the sight of all these amorous people just makes him sad, since he is unable to feel love or lust. In order to end his suffering, he goes back to Paris, pours all of his perfume over his head, and is literally devoured by a group of passerby. All that is left of Jean-Baptiste by the end of the story is an empty vial.
Best part of story, including ending:
I loved this story because of the vivid description. Smell is not usually fawned over in most literature, but Suskind does a brilliant job detailing the plot via scent.
Best scene in story:
There are so many... Perhaps the opening scene where a simple square in 1700 Paris is described. It seems so basic, but one feels as though they're pruned with all the adjectives of smell the author comes up with, for better and worse.
Opinion about the main character:
I like that he's not an emotional being - he doesn't love anyone, or feel any real emotion to anyone he comes across. He's a psychopath, and yet the one thing he does feel is need. The need for bigger and better smells.
