Perfume: The Story of Murder
SynopsisPlot
The year is 1738; the place, Paris. A baby is born under a fish-monger’s bloody table in a marketplace, and abandoned. Orphaned, passed over to the monks as a charity case, already there is something in the aura of the tiny infant that is unsettling. No one will look after him; he is somehow too demanding, and, even more disturbing, something is missing: as his wet nurse tries to explain, he doesn’t smell the way a baby should smell; indeed, he has no scent at all. Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes.
Story
About this book
In 1738 Paris, a baby is born beneath a fishmonger's table in a crowded marketplace and immediately abandoned. The child, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, survives despite neglect at every stage of his early life. He unsettles everyone around him for reasons they cannot quite articulate. His wet nurse notices something strange: the infant has no body scent at all. Yet Grenouille himself possesses an extraordinary sense of smell, one so precise he can identify and separate every odor in the city around him.
As he grows older, Grenouille apprentices with a perfumer and learns the craft of blending oils and essences. His ability far exceeds what his teacher can offer. He becomes consumed by the idea of capturing scents that no one has bottled before, from metal surfaces to freshly cut wood. This obsession eventually turns toward something darker when he encounters a particular human scent that fixes itself in his mind. From that point, his pursuit takes on a sinister and increasingly dangerous shape.
Patrick Süskind published the novel in 1985, originally in German. Set entirely in eighteenth-century France, the story follows Grenouille's world through its sensory details, building an atmosphere where smell replaces sight as the dominant way of understanding people and places.
