Perfume
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (German: Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders; pronounced [das paʁˈfɛ̃ː diː ɡəˈʃɪçtə ˈaɪ̯nəs ˈmœʁdɐs] (About this soundlisten)) is a 1985 literary historical fantasy novel by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meanings that scents may have.
The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unloved orphan in 18th-century France who is born with an exceptional sense of smell, capable of distinguishing a vast range of scents in the world around him. Grenouille becomes a perfumer but later becomes involved in murder when he encounters a young girl with an unsurpassed wondrous scent.
With translations into 49 languages and more than 20 million copies sold worldwide to date, Perfume is one of the best-selling German novels of the 20th century.[2] The title remained in bestseller lists for about nine years, and received almost unanimously positive national and international critical acclaim. It was translated into English by John E. Woods and won both the World Fantasy Award and the PEN Translation Prize in 1987. Some editions of the novel, including the first, have as their cover image Antoine Watteau’s painting Jupiter and Antiope, which depicts a sleeping woman.
A boy is born in Paris, France in the year 1738. His mother is tried almost immediately for previous infanticide and subsequently executed, leaving him an orphan. He is named “Jean-Baptiste Grenouille” (French for “frog”) and is fostered but is a difficult, solitary child and is eventually apprenticed to a local tanner. Unknown to other people, Grenouille has a remarkable sense of smell, giving him an extraordinary ability to discern subtlest odors from complex mixtures of scent and across great distances; as a result, he can perform apparently magical feats such as identifying bad vegetables, discerning approaching visitors, or navigating in total darkness.
One day, long after having memorized nearly all the smells of the city, Grenouille is surprised by a unique smell. He finds the source of the scent: a young virgin girl just passing puberty. Entranced by her scent and believing that he alone must possess it, he strangles her and stays with her body until the scent has left it. In his quest to learn more about the art of perfume-making, he becomes apprenticed to one of the city’s finest perfumers, Giuseppe Baldini, an aging, once-great master of the trade who finds himself increasingly outperformed by rival perfumers. Grenouille proves himself a prodigy by copying and improving a rival’s perfume in Baldini’s laboratory, after which Baldini offers him an apprenticeship. Baldini teaches Grenouille the basic techniques of perfumery while selling Grenouille’s masterful new formulas as his own, restoring his flagging reputation. Baldini eventually reveals to Grenouille that there are techniques other than distillation that can be used to preserve a wider range of odours, which can only be learned in the heartland of the perfumer’s craft, in the region of Grasse in the French Riviera. Shortly after, Grenouille elects to leave Paris, and Baldini dies when his shop collapses into the river Seine.
