PERFUME:
THE STORY OF A MURDERER by PATRICK SŰSKIND
The story opens in the later years of
the 17th century France when the mother of the protagonist ‘Jean
Baptiste Grenouille’ tries to ruthlessly kill him as soon as he is born for she
is a habitual practitioner of infanticide.
However, Jean survives and his mother is
caught. She is tried in court for multiple infanticides, found guilty, and then
decapitated. Thus, Jean is rendered an orphan, as there is no mention of his
father in the novel anywhere.
Jean is gifted with an unnatural acute
sense of smell, which is almost superhuman, even better than the finest sniffer
dogs, and as odd as that, he has no human scent of his own.
Jean’s god gift becomes a curse for him,
because for being different he is mistook for devil as a baby, ostracised by
other kids at orphanage, and even subjected to discrimination at the hands of
caretakers of the orphanage.
Therefore, he grows up cold, unfeeling
and unloved.
Jean’s curse is also the greatest joy of
his life. His main hobby – that is an obsession – is to seek out every kind of
smell, good or bad, and remember it forever. He has a mental library of all the
smells he has ever come across and he often relies only on his sense of smell
to walk around instead of using his eyesight.
Jean’s life is complacent, tasteless and
purposeless until that fateful day when for the first time in his life, he
smells the captivating scent of a beautiful virgin girl close to puberty. Jean
feels a sudden exhilaration in his nerves due to her scent that amount to
passion but Jean is unable to understand it, as he does not know love or
affection.
Jean seeks out the girl and accidently
kills her. Then strips her body naked, lays her on the ground and keeps on
smelling her scent until it disappears due to her being dead.
Overwhelmed with her scent, Jean decides
to become the greatest perfumer on earth in order to recreate the scent of the
dead girl, which ultimately onsets the chain of murders that leaves 25
beautiful virgin girls end up as a perfume bottle.
In this audacious novel Mr. Patrick,
never shy away from depicting nudity, profanity, violence, sexual situations
and even orgies as he shows us the workings of the demented mind of a predatory
serial killer with a non-sexual nature, obsessed only with scents.
The maddening plot of the novel has a
mesmerizing appeal to it. You know that whatever is being told is impossible
and even senseless but you keep reading it because it is so differently exciting.
This novel is not the usual
mystery-thriller novel that most of us are accustomed as it encompasses several
genres including mystery, horror, supernatural, erotica, and absurdity – I wish
there was some other word to describe the last type of genre but there isn’t.
I am giving it only three out of five
stars because this unorthodox novel is not a pure mystery but it deserves a
place in the novel collection of every mystery novel lover.
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