“Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the man who can smell his way into the world, was born in the most auspicious of places – in a wet market among the guts and scales of fishes. From then on, his life has been determined by the persistent call of his nose and he finds himself in situations that bring him closer to his goal: the extracting and packaging of the most fragrant perfume of all.
Grenouille is like an autistic savant. He has a gift: a hypersensitive sense of smell, more powerful than Wolverine's, so much so that he can break down a perfume into its basic components, and even recreate it given all the scent-ingredients. The genius in him can identify not only the components of a smell but also the exact proportions of each component, the exact formula to a perfume. Yet like an autist, Grenouille has the problem of connecting emotionally with people. He is an introvert, emotionally detached from the world, and his singular purpose is what keeps him plunging ahead in life.
In Perfume, translated from the German by John E. Woods, Patrick Süskind gives a portrait of the perfumer as an artist. He does so in the style of an inverted German fairy tale, a twisted strain of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. And as a Bildungsroman, eschewing the tradition of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, the epiphanies arrive and they come in the form of scents, of odors, and of concentrated essences.
Full review at:
http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2009/09/perfume-patrick-suskind.html
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Rise wrote this review Monday, November 16 2009.
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