Thursday, January 15, 2009

Perfume - the Story of a Murderer

Too much nano- and microblogging and too little blogging lately. Still, I read the Perfume - the Story of a Murderer (1985), Patrick Süskind. I don't know what took me so long, it's a precious gem that turns around Jean-Baptise Grenouille in 18th century France. If it was originally written in French I would definitely had gone for that version, but no (it's in German). The novel explores the function of scent and contains quite a lot of technical descriptions of scent extraction, but not too much. Grenouille, born without any odour whatsoever, has an amazing sense of smell. He becomes an apprentice in the making of perfume and leaves Paris for Grasse, on a quest for the ultimate human scent.