Perfume By: Patrick Süskind
Year: 1985
Genre: Fiction - Historical Fantasy
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born among refuse under a fish counter in a Parisian market place. His infanticidal mother faints before she has a chance to knife him (as she did the three babies preceding him) and the child is found when he cries. His mother is executed for her crimes and he is farmed out to a wet nurse. The wet nurse returns him to the clergy because of his curious lack of scent.
I wasn't really loving the book until that bit. I have a small child. When he was tiny, it was his scent that made me love him. When he came back from his grandmother's one day (where he had had a bath and had his clothes washed), I didn't recognise his smell anymore and the URGE to push him away and not feed him was intense. So, the book had me there.
So the clergyman thinks the wet nurse is talking bollocks, until he smells the child himself and deems it the work of satan. Grenouille begins a life without love. A life of being pushed pillar to post. But he seems to thrive on it. He learns to speak by smelling rather than seeing, because he sense of smell is so finely attuned that all his other senses are redundant. He never forgets a scent and becomes a fine perfumier's apprentice, creating fabulous scents by using his nose alone. He has no body odour. None at all. He can sneak among people, and people don't want to get too close to the man they cannot smell. He kills a girl for her scent, almost dies himself and is granted his freedom by his master in exchange for swearing never to confess it was he who created the amazing perfumes.
Then he takes his freedom, goes to a cave and wanks himself into a frenzy for seven years. And that's not even the start of the bizarreness.
It is not an easy read. It's twisted, it's sick and it's dangerously erotic. I loved it and recommend it.
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