As promised last week, a postcard from the slums of 18th century Paris…
I read this book in a fever-filled fug of Covid in 2022; the pages wrinkled where my clammy fingertips grasped them, the cover instantly bent back round and curled at the corners like a well-thumbed beach read.
After one read, it looked like I’d had the book for decades – which frankly I should have. It’s a classic Gothic novel and a hitherto shameful hole in my reading history.
As opening lines go, I think these are pretty masterful:
“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…”
Grenouille is born and then left to die by his mother. She’s tried for infanticide and then executed and then he’s fostered.
As he grows up, the young boy discovers he has a unique gift – an absolute sense of smell. In other words, he can smell everything.
[Sidenote: when I saw A Taste of Things (see link below) recently, there’s a scene where a young kitchen protegée can list off all the hundreds of ingredients in a stew from tasting a mere spoonful and it reminded me of Grenouille, who can reel off all the scents in, for instance, a brass doorknob or a piece of fresh-cut wood]
He gets apprenticed to a well-respected Parisian perfumer and the rags-to-riches tale unfolds from there, right? Wrong! I did say this is a Gothic novel after all…
One day, Grenouille smells something with which he becomes obsessed. Take a deep breath, reader… yep, it’s the smell of a beautiful young virgin. I won’t ruin the plot for you but let’s just say he goes on a bit of a killing spree with an unusual motive – to create the ultimate perfume.
I’m not sure I liked this book but I’m glad I’ve read it. It’s disturbing and memorable and I loved the inventiveness of it.
But it was very wordy! While some passages were fabulously evocative, others were un peu trop and I found myself scanning a few paras here and there.
Overall, reading this was a bit like a Covid dream – weird, fantastical and unforgettable – and I recommend you have a read for something completely different.
Here are a couple of passages I particularly enjoyed.
Firstly, Süskind describing the smell of humanity, a rancid stench we apparently all have in common:
“There was a basic perfumatory theme to the odour of humanity, a rather simple one, incidentally: a sweaty-oily, sour-cheesy, quite richly repulsive basic theme that clung to all humans equally and above which each individual’s aura hovered only as a small cloud of more refined particularity.”
And then this, which really made me smile… when Grenouille attempts to create a smell that imitates human odour:
“Grenouille gathered up his most striking ingredients in Runel’s workshop. There was a little pile of cat-shit behind the threshold of the door leading out to the courtyard, still quite fresh. He took half a teaspoon of it and placed it together with several drops of vinegar and finely ground salt in a mixing bottle. Under the worktable he found a thumbnail-sized piece of cheese, apparently from one of Runel’s lunches. It was already quite old, had begun to decompose, and gave off a biting, pungent odour. From the lid of a sardine tub that stood at the back of the shop, he scratched off a rancid, fishy something-or-other, mixed it with rotten egg and castoreum, ammonia, nutmeg, horn shavings and singed pork rind, finely ground. To this he added a relatively large amount of civet, mixed these ghastly ingredients with alcohol, let it digest and filtered it into a second bottle. The bilge smelled revolting. Its stink was putrid, like a sewer, and if you fanned its vapour just once to mix it with fresh air, it was as if you were standing in Paris on a hot summer day, at the corner of the Rue aux Fers and the Rue de la Lingerie, where the odours from Les Halles, the Cimetière des Innocents and the overcrowded tenements converged.
On top of this disgusting base, which smelled more like a cadaver than a human being, Grenouille spread a layer of fresh, oily scents: peppermint, lavender, turpentine, lime, eucalyptus, which he then simultaneously disguised and tamed with the pleasant bouquet of fine floral oils – geranium, rose, orange blossom and jasmine. After a second dilution with alcohol and a splash of vinegar there was nothing left of the disgusting basic odour on which the mixture was built. The latent stench lay lost and unnoticeable under the fresh ingredients; the nauseous part, pampered by the scent of flowers, had become almost interesting; and, strangely enough, there was no putrefaction left to smell, not the least. On the contrary, the perfume seemed to exhale the robust, vivacious scent of life.”
The book was made into a film with Ben Whishaw in 2006. I haven’t seen it yet but I did go to a museum in Lille which displayed all the sets from the movie. You can read all about it in last week’s Carte Postale.
And here’s the link to my carte on The Taste of Things, which is altogether less disturbing and more hunger-inducing than Perfume!