كل ما في الرواية خارج عن المألوف

لا أدري ماذا سيقول أصحاب مقولة " اتبع شغفك " بعد قراءة هذه الرواية

هل سيستمرون بنصحنا أن نتبع شغفنا حتى لو كان في النهاية أن نسلخ رأس الجميلات ههه !!

أسرتني هذه الرواية الغريبة العجيبة التي تُحفّز عقل القارئ ليُبصر ويستنشق حروف الرواية بأنفهِ، فيجنح بخيالهِ مع شخوص الرواية ليقرأ قصة منتنة، شيقة، مرعبة ـ تحفة أدبية نادرة.

A cross between The Silence of the Lambs and a period drama. That's how I would describe Perfume, the great German classic of the 1980s. Basically, it's an eighteenth-century murder story, except that it doesn't focus on the victims and the hunt for the killer, but rather emphasises the life and times of the murderer, who is an unusual protagonist to say the least.

Perfume tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an eighteenth-century Parisian with a unique gift: a prodigiously well-developed olfactory sense which allows him to recognise pretty much any scent or smell. After a childhood full of hardship, he is apprenticed to a perfumier who teaches him all he knows about distilling smells. Unbeknownst to the perfumier, however, Grenouille isn't in it for the fashionable perfumes. Rather than extracting scents from flowers and petals, he wishes to extract smells from living objects -- more specifically, from the beautiful virgins he comes across every now and then, who smell like heaven to him. And so he plies his trade, hoping to learn that elusive trick which will enable him to trap the scents of the lovely young ladies he covets from afar, so that he can create the perfume he really wants -- essence of maiden.

Perfume is a riveting look into the mind of an obsessed man -- a murderer whose immorality and eccentricity put him on a par with Thomas Harris' unforgettable serial killers. As unlikeable and depraved as Grenouille is, you almost sympathise with him. He may be a monomaniac, but his perseverance and creativity and the originality of his quest are such you almost wish him to succeed, or at least to see how far he will get before he gets caught. Suskind does such a great job describing his obsession that you simply keep turning the pages, waiting to see what fate has in store for this horrible yet ever so original murderer.

The writing on display is beautiful. A tremendous lot of research went into Perfume, and it shows. The descriptions of the various perfume-making techniques are rich, detailed and thoroughly impressive. Suskind frequently devotes whole pages to explanations of parfumiers' secrets; it is testimony to the quality of his writing that they never get tedious. He also does a marvellous job evoking the odours of Grenouille's world and the way in which they affect him. With its many powerful descriptions of odours (both pleasant and unpleasant), the book is a veritable smellscape which makes you increasingly aware of the smells surrounding you. However, it is not without its problems. The middle chapters are a bit of a drag and the ending is so over the top that many readers will be put off by it. I was a bit put off by it myself, yet I can see why Suskind went for the grotesque touch. For all its scientific detail, Perfume is essentially a fairy tale, and anything but a strange ending would have been a betrayal. It's weird, but if you read the story as if it were fairy tale, the ending makes sense. It's a fairy tale with a fairy-tale ending, and then some.

Книга оставляет двоякое чувство. С одной стороны, автор – действительно превосходный рассказчик, тут сомнений нет, и сочувствие униженному герою поначалу нравится, с другой стороны, возникает ряд вопросов. Омерзительна сама идея мацерации (извлечение запахов через настаивание в жире – термин из ароматерапии) запахов из людей, причем после их смерти. Тут же возникают этические вопросы – кажутся ли или нет евгенические нотки? На мой взгляд, книга - из жанра фантастический хоррор. Очевидно, что Жан-Батист Гренуй - маньяк, а не просто убийца. Есть перекличка с Фаулзовским «Коллекционером», но Зюскинд скуп на раскрытие эмоций и духовного мира и переживаний его героев, причем не только Гренуя, и это - очевидный недостаток романа. Единственное, что мы знаем о Гренуе - это то, что он не любил размышлять, и что он ненавидел людей. Двоякость реакций толпы на одни и те же духи, сделанные из запаха красивейших девушек, вызывает когнитивный диссонанс. В одном случае, палачи склоняют свои орудия казни и освобождают осужденного, а толпа зрителей предаются оргии, подобно Босховскому «Саду наслаждений», а в другом, толпа не просто раздирает на куски, а буквально живьем съедает Гренуя. Любая книга имеет идеи, которые автор хочет донести до людей, чему учит эта история. Здесь я не могу понять – чему Зюскинд пытается нас научить или какую мысль донести. Фантастика, даже в историческом фоне, по сути выдумка. Но хорошая фантастика тем не менее имеет идеи.

4.0 Stars
This was an interesting unsettling dark fiction classic. It was strange and gripping. I often make the incorrect assumption that older books weren't dark so these kinds of stories help to debunk those ideas.

Entretenida novela, aunque al final se hace bastante pesada.

Entertaining novel, although in the end it gets quite heavy.

This was dark but enjoyable. The story follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a poor soul born in a fish market and abandoned by his mother. His early life is in poverty and as an orphan, and he soon recognizes he has a gift for scent. As Grenouille grows into adolescence and young adulthood, he develops the talent for scent, scent identification, and longs to master creating perfumes. Yet, he is cold, distant, and quite possibly mentally unstable. Due to his upbringing, he lacked attachment to others, lacked warmth and interpersonal connection between others, and lacked empathy/sympathy for others.

His quest takes him under the tutelage of a master perfume-maker, Baldini. He learns the fine art of chemistry, lab work, and making perfumes.

Grenouille, who is compared to a blood-drinking tick throughout the book, takes a more serious approach to creating the perfect scent he desires. His lack of emotional closeness to people enabled to murder young girls in order to capture their scent to be used in his perfumes.

I really liked this story and was captivated the whole time at Grenouille and the homicidal path he went to achieving his aim. I saw the movie in 2007 and it was good too. I would recommend it to anyone as an enjoyable book. Thanks!

This is one hell of a strange inversion of a Jesus Allegory.

It's absolutely obsessed with the idea of innocence and scents, but more than that, it's a veritable encyclopedia of tons of smells. Borne of effluvia, the brilliance of his nose and his analytical ability sends him to the forefront of the perfumery business in Paris, nearly 300 years ago. Still steeped in effluvia, he discovers a dark secret about himself... he has no scent.

Of evil impulse and indefatigable drive, he recreates all kinds of scents and eventually creates the ultimate essence of innocence... and he, this empty, scentless creature of effluvia becomes, at least in the noses of everyone around him, the ultimate expression of love.

This was very, very fun. I particularly love inversions of old tropes. The ending fits so nicely. :)

A simple tale, a cornucopia of smells and description, and a fitting tale of justice.

(You can see my video review here: https://youtu.be/vnorkpB_Lnk )

Life is cheap in Patrick Süskind's Perfume. From the very first page, newborn babies are dumped among heaps of rotten fish while the mother who birthed them is unrepentant as she faces execution in front of an angry mob.

And why shouldn't she be?

All she's ever known is a squalid, miserable world that would sooner walk over her than lend a helping hand. However, it would be wrong to say that the meanness Süskind draws in his characters is rooted in poverty.

Regardless of social class, nearly everybody we meet in Perfume is only interested in their own success: whether their vice be money, sex, social status or power, they pursue their petty goals under the same misguided belief that it is they who are the smart ones, that they are the protagonists of a tale that by mere fact of existence deserves a happy end. How wrong they are. Rarely does Süskind let a member of his despicable cast depart the novel without facing an absurd, ironic or just downright wretched death. It's almost sentimental in how much attention is paid to their Willy Wonka styled exits and, taken together, the larger picture of a meaningless universe as a whole. Through it all though, there is one man who seems to be on the trail of something divine.

Much has been said of the aromatic prose that Süskind leverages to portray our hero's sense of smell: Scents are everything to Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. As his singular passion, their descriptions are given all the care and flourish required to convince you that he's in touch with something beautiful and true. It all amounts to shit of course, and Jean-Baptiste's sacred hunt turns out to be just as foolish as anybody else's as they tumble toward their mutual dooms.

In Perfume, no pillar of society is left undemolished. Religion, government, science, and even brotherly love are all perverted by story's end. It would be a tough read that a lot of people would have a hard time getting through if only for how damn well Süskind can describe the smell of a rotting corpse, an easterly wind, or the wisp of a young red-headed woman's hair.

(Don't forget to check out my video review: https://youtu.be/vnorkpB_Lnk )

I enjoyed the weirdness of this novel, and the author's willingness to follow through on what is a strange, but very original premise. Through immersion in scent, Süskind is able to create entirely new, evocative landscapes and unique perspectives. But he seems to have plundered and exhausted this rich seam fairly early on, and rather than developing the story and characters in a meaningful way, he unfortunately favours repetition and increasingly ridiculous plots.

Perfume is a memorable novel, and there were many elements I enjoyed. But I wish the protagonist were a more substantial character, and I would have liked to see a bit more depth to the story, rather than a sequence of disposable characters and predictable events culminating in an absurd, meaningless ending.

(I also found the writing style very grating, though with a translation you can never tell whose fault that is.)

رواية استثنائية بمعنى الكلمه ... الفكرة والأحداث مجنونه تماما
كمحبة للروايات البوليسية أقدر أقول إني انخدعت في العنوان وافتكرت إنها بتتكلم عن محقق بيدور على قاتل... لكن الموضوع كان واضح إن البطل هو نفسه القاتل.. مش عارفه ازاي أسأت فهم العنوان
والرواية بتتكلم عن الرضيع جان باتيست غرونوي والي حاولت والدته تتخلص منه إلا إن أمرها ينكشف بعد سماع الناس صراخه فيتم انقاذ حياته واعدام الأم .... مشكلته إن ما عندوش رائحة ودا الي خلى الناس تنفر منه فيعيش في دار للأيتام ويكبر وهو عنده هدف واحد إنه يصنع رائحة خاصة له.

المزايا
1- فكرة مجنونه جديده
2- تحتوي على معلومات مفيدة تخص صناعة العطور
3- السرد ممتع
4- الوصف هايل بتحس كإنك بتشم الرواية مش بتقراها هههه
5- شخصية رئيسيه محيره... متعرفش تتعاطف معه ولا تكرهه ودي تحسب للكاتب
6- نهاية مجنونه وغير متوقعه

العيوب:
1- ممله أوي في بعض الأحيان

Wow, another modern Classic brilliantly written and intriguingly absorbing with so much magical imagination and originality. The story was so easy to follow and you could not put it down. Some of my favourite parts of France such as Vence, Antibes and Grasse are used as locations which added to my delight.

A disgust of Humanity and our traits are cleverly woven into the story.

I’ve never seen the word “Olfactory” used so often in the same book, but come on that’s what it’s about!!

Perhaps I need to consider a name change to “Graham olfactory inks”