Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is about odors, smells, scents, bouquets, aromas, stenches, miasmas, etc. and their influence over people’s senses and, ultimately, actions and decisions. Now what if you could capture such influence and make it yours? What if, with such power in your hands, you could control people, lure them, abuse them, and have them do whatever you want without them ever being the wiser? How much time would it take before you, the master perfumer, began to fall prey to your own newfound ability, then went to town with it and altogether joined the dark side, succumbing as a result to all its seductive, alluring, and murderous vices and perversions? Well, if you are so inclined to find out, the answer is in this book, which, truth be told, is an absolute masterpiece… that is, until you reach the end. And then, even though you know it couldn’t have ended any other way, you can’t help but notice a wistful fragrance of might-have-beens in the air as you reluctantly yet gladly turn the last page.

OLIVIER DELAYE
Author of the SEBASTEN OF ATLANTIS series
n  n

Vaau kokia tai buvo kvapų kelionė!
Be galo gražus rašymo stilius, skaičiau kaip pasaką. Vaikas gimęs su neįtikėtina uosle, patyręs begalę sunkumų, ir tik vienintelė jo aistra - kvapas, drąsiai vedė jį per gyvenimą. Žavi tai, su kokiu užsidegimu jis 'rinko' tuos kvapus, visus, nebuvo jam nei gerų nei blogų kvapų, visi jam vienodai svarbūs. Kai užuodė jaunos merginos kvapą, kuris buvo visiškai kitoks nei iki šiol sutikti kvapai, jis visiškai pameta galvą.. Netikėtai randasi vienintelis jo tikslas - išsaugoti tą kvapą. Jis stropus, sunkiai mokėsi ir visas žinias tiesiog siurbė į save, ir jam to buvo maža.. atlikinėjo įvairiausius bandymus, kaip išgauti kuo įvairesnius kvapus, stipriai išgyveno nesėkmes.. Tai ką jis darė baisu, jis - žudikas, bet iš to kaip autorius aprašo jo jausmus, mintis, lyg norisi suprasti jį, pateisinti, jis tiesiog negalėjo kitaip elgtis. Fanatizmas ir talentas - viskas kartu.

Man patiko, kad autorius aprašė kiekvieno personažo likimą. Lyg prie kiekvieno įvykio skrupulingai sudėlioti taškai. Pabaiga tikras triumfas, tikslas kurio taip siekė.. Man ši knyga atradimas, mėgavausi kiekvienu puslapiu ir skaityčiau dar kartą

"فى راجل بيطفى الست و راجل بينورها , انا باعملها كولونيا "
- جان باتيست غرنوي

من اين لك بهذة الفكرة يا زوسكند !!
قرائتى الاولي لزوسكند كانت نوفيلا "الحمامة"و فيها نواجه الضعف و الخوف الانسانى الذى يجعلك تتقوقع على نفسك و تهرب من المجتمع و من التجربة فتصبح اثير روتينك اليومى الرتيب على ان تخرج من عزلتك اما فى قرائتى الثانية له فى العطر تطرق زوسكند الى اشياء كثيرة اولها البحث عن الهوية ،ايضاً سؤال مهم هل الموهبة و الهبة التى يتميز بها شخص بعينه , عندما يتبع شغفه هل هذا يؤدى دائما الى افضل النتائج ام من الممكن ان تكون هذة الموهبة هى سبب شقائك و فنائك !! .

جان باتيست غرنوي الشخصية التى تحب ان تكرهها و تكره ان تحبها .
روايات قليلة تجعلك تتأمل شخصياتها بتمعن و تذهب بخيالك بعيداً فى محاولة لفهم ابعاد الشخصية ،هذا النوع من الشخصيات الذى يجعلك تتعاطف معه مبكراً و تشفق عليه و تتمنى ان يخرج من هذا العالم المؤبوه الذى به من الروائح ما يجعلك تتقيئ و من الشخصيات ما يجعلك تفقد ايمانك بالعالم ثم تدريجياً يولد بداخلك اشمئزاز لم ينفك ان يصبح كره و شر فتتمنى ان ينال جزاءه سريعا لكن بداخلك تتمنى ان ينجو ايضاً و يجد ذاته فى عالم نبذه مع ولادته و لم يشفق عليه برائحه له تجعله معترف به او شخصية حتى تميزه .

جان باتيست غرنوي المولود بلا رائحة فى اكثر اماكن العالم رائحة فى سوق شعبى يحتوى على ابشع الروائح الكريهة وسط القمامة و بقايا السمك و فضلات البشر الذى لم يعرف الحب فبالتالى لم يتكون عنده الاحاسيس الطبيعة لاى طفل من براءة و شفقة بل عاش فى عالم يكرهه و يتجنبه و يشمئز من منظره البشع و عرجه و ضئالته ، فاصبح يحتقر البشر فى المقابل و لا يراهم الا روائح تغذى شهوته حتى ارتقى بانفه فاصبح يبحث عن قلة قليلة تنبع بالحب فهولاء من كان يشتهيهم و هم عبق البشرية الذى كان يصبو اليه فى محاولة لايجاد ذاته ايضا و رائحته الشخصية .

“بوسع البشر أن يغمضوا أعينهم أمام ماهو عظيم أو جميل، وأن يغلقوا آذانهم أمام الألحان والكلام المعسول ولكن ليس بوسعهم الهروب من العبق لأنه شقيق الشهيق، معه يدخل إلى ذواتهم، ولايستطيعون صدّه إن رغبوا بالبقاء على قيد الحياة، إنه يدخل إلى أعماقهم، الى القلب مباشرة، حيث يتم الفصل الحاسم بين الميل اليه أو احتقاره، بين القرف منه أو الرغبة فيه، بين حبه أو كرهه و ذلك الذى يهيمن على الروائح ليسيطر على قلوب البشر" .

n
شغف غرنوى و انفه الذى لا مثيل له الذى يجذبه الى اول ضحاياه التى تجبه بعبقها الملهم بالحب فيحاول الامساك به و الاحتفاظ به لكنه ينسل من بين ايديه عندما تموت بين يديه فتختفى رائحتها كالسراب من بين يديه يجعله يثور و يكاد ان يموت كمداً حتى يلتقى بالديني العطار فيمده بالوصفات العطرية فى مقابل تعليمه كيف يحتفظ بالرائحة و بشهادة منه يواصل رحلته الى مدينة الروائح ليتعلم كيف يحتفظ بالجمال فى عالم مليئ بالروائح الجميلة و منها تبدا رحلته الفعلية و شذوذه و جنونه المطلق .

" هذا العالم وحده الذى كان يعترف به لانه يشابه عالم روحه . "

n
قد تخدعك الرواية بانها رواية جريمة نظراً لعنوانها العطر : قصة قاتل ، لكنها ابعد ما يكون عن الجريمة و تيمة التحقيق , الرواية اعمق من هذا بكثير و سوف تثير فى نفسك التساؤلات فلسفية و سوف تشتتك بغرائبيتها , رواية ظلامية لا وجود للسعادة بها و لكنها ليست كئيبة ايضاً , هى عن عالم تتمنى ان يطواه النسيان كما طوئ جان باتيست .

احببت الرواية و زوسكند لازال يبهرنى بطريقة سرده و وصفه جعلت الكلمات ذات رائحة نفاذة لا اريد ان تزول و النهاية جائت حسن الختام فى رواية لن تنسى و فكرتها سوف تطاردنى كثيراً .

What a fascinating novel, a tale revolving around the sense of smell. Patrick Süskind is to be commended.

As many outstanding musicians are born with what is termed "perfect pitch," so Patrick Süskind's main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born with a unique and extraordinary sense of smell.

Since there are so many outstanding reviews already posted here, in the spirit of originality, I'll share a taste (or perhaps I should say a smell?) of what it means for smell to play such a prominent, overwhelming place in someone's life. Here's a micro-fiction from the master of the micro, Brooklyn born and bred Peter Cherches, about -

THE MAN WHO SMELLED FUNNY
There once was a man who smelled funny. He didn't smell bad, he smelled funny. Whenever he walked into a room, people would begin to laugh uncontrollably. The man didn't like the effect he had on people. He couldn't go anywhere without making people laugh. He could never have a serious conversation with anybody, because they were always laughing so hard.

The man tried everything. He tried bathing three or four times a day, but he couldn't get rid of the smell. He wore expensive cologne, but that only made him smell like a combination of expensive cologne and the funny smell.

Life was difficult for the man. Trouble followed him everywhere he went, because of his funny smell. One day the man went to the public library and the entire library broke into uproarious laughter. The librarian tried to make the people stop laughing, but even while she was putting her fingers to her lips and saying, "Shhh," she was cackling like a hyena. Finally the guard came up to the man.

"Excuse me - ha ha - Sir," the guard said, "but I'm afraid - he he he - I'm going to have to - ha ha - ask you to - ho ho ho - leave."

The man was so embarrassed he turned beet-red and rushed out of the library.

The man had trouble keeping a job too. He was a good worker, and people liked him, but his funny smell was so disruptive that little work ever got done. Whenever his bosses fired him thy laughed the whole time. "I'm so sorry - ha ha ha - to have to do this," thy would say. "I know this will be very hard on your family - guffaw guffaw guffaw."

The man who smelled funny was very sad. It wasn't his fault he smelled funny, but he couldn't keep a job because of it.

Then, one day, the man came up with a brilliant idea: he would become a stand-up comic.

The man who smelled funny got himself booked at a local comedy club. He was nervous on opening night, but the second he got on stage the entire audience began laughing wildly. He told the worst jokes imaginable: corny old jokes and pointless shaggy dog stories. And he had the audience rolling in the aisles. He was a hit.

The local newspapers gave him a rave review. "We don't know how he does it," the review said, "but he breathes new life into the oldest jokes in the business."

The man took his act on the road. He played all the best comedy clubs in the country and earned lots of money. He was living the good life.

Now the man who smelled funny was hardly ever sad. Never again would he lose a job because he made people laugh.

And he decided that he would never agree to perform his comedy act on television.

Not until they come out with Smell-O-Vision, that is.

-------

Note: The Man Who Smelled Funny is part of the Peter Cherches book: Whistler's Mother's Son

n  n   

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

n  n So begins this tale of the life and misadventures of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Jean-Basptiste was born with no smell, but he has an elevated gift of the olfactory inclination. n  

“And there you have it! That is a clear sign. If he were possessed by the devil, then he would have to stink.”

n So gifted was he, in fact, that he could smell people coming from a distance away and his warder believed Jean-Baptiste to be psychic. Honestly, with the fates he could accomplish, I'm surprised he wasn't supernatural.

Jean-Baptiste is sold to a tanner at the age of 11 where he perfects his gift of scent. A lot happens that gets lost in all the mire I was enduring just to get to the murders. At this point, he kills one young virgin girl to preserve her scent forever. Then, he does nothing for years until he goes to work at a perfumery.

While there, he is basically a Gary Stu of the perfume makers. An inexperienced savant who can somehow concoct the perfect perfume, measurements and all, just by his fucking nose. Lord, spare me. I found this book interesting at first. If inappropriately funny. It's very immersive. I can't speak to its accuracy regarding 18th century France but unlike that heaping pile of shit Addie LaRue, I actually felt like I was in 18th century France. But what this book likes to tell you is that Jean-Baptiste has a gifted nose. He also had a supernatural power of healing.

n  In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest.n

The book tries to say that he survives all his maladies through spite and malice. Lol ok.

I don't really know what to make of this book. It's infuriating because it felt like there was so much more hiding under the surface. It seemed to promise me the disgusting pleasure of popping a ripe pimple but really it was an itch that disappeared. We spend so much time following Jean-Baptiste trying to recreate the scents of innocuous objects like brass doorknobs or maggots. The whole time I had to keep asking myself, where are all the murders.

After he spends 7 years without proper food and water, subsisting on drops from a wet rock, moss, frogs and lizards, Jean Bapstiste rejoins civilisation to dandy around with some charlatan who was selling a bogus treatment. By this stage I was just annoyed. Jean does start a string of murders where he is leading up to his ultimate prize. The most beautiful Laure. A virginal beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant who was virginal and beautiful. It is all we know about her. The book won't let you forget. The narrator, the girl's father, Jean-Baptiste won't fucking shut up about how she's such a beautiful fucking virgin. And oh my god, I was ready to tear my hair out.

The book also fails to follow Jean-Baptiste when he killed 24 girls to practise how to capture their scents and perfect how he'll get Laure's scent. No, we had to be with him in a cave when he would blow his wad because he had a wet dream about the first girl he killed. We had to follow him when he was trying to recreate the scents of inconsequential items like wood or coins. We had to follow him when he clubbed a puppy to death. But when he's actually terrorising the residents of a remote French village, literally the most interesting part of the story, we get fleeting accounts from the villagers.

The final conflict is so lackluster, it makes you wonder if Suskind had ran out of cocaine when he was writing it. The prose is lazy, the suspense dead, and the ending meaningless. This may be the worst book about a serial killer I've ever read which is funny because it damn near sapped me of my will to live.

"hay en el perfume una fuerza de persuasión más fuerte que las palabras, el destello de las miradas, los sentimientos y la voluntad. La fuerza de persuasión del perfume no se puede contrarrestar, nos invade como el aire invade nuestros pulmones, nos llena, nos satura, no existe ningún remedio contra ella".

This might well be the perfect novel - a gorgeously written page-turner, with a protagonist so breathtakingly original and convincingly crafted he drags you headfirst into his dreary world of tormented desire, a cast of unforgettable characters and a recreation of the world as though it had existed solely so that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille could roam it.

One can't help feeling that, in creating such a hermetic antihero, Suskind might well be writing about himself - seeing as the reclusive author hasn't since allowed as but few and fragmentary (though brilliant in themselves) glimpses of his psyche, effectively disappearing much like his ill-fated murderer does.

Woods is one hell of a translator (his heaven-sent work on Thomas Mann alone would suffice to call him a literary benefactor of humanity), and this is a book you'll definitely find yourselves returning to, either in thought or by devouring it again and again.

(And although this is neither here nor there, this is the book that made a writer of me - so I can't help loving it to pieces).

This was a re-read for me, having read it around 2005. I recalled enjoying it, enjoying the writing which was overwhelmingly descriptive of the scents and odours throughout the book, and enjoying the dark character of Grenouille.

Reading it again some fifteen years later was equally enjoyable, and I retained the four stars I awarded it when I joined Goodreads (which, lets face it, is just an estimation based on recollection of lots of books).

I don't intend to plot outline - there are loads of reviews to do that, so there really is no need. I will touch on things I thought well done...

The amount of research the author did to describe the methods and techniques used in the tannery and the perfumers was impressive. It was very detailed, and as Grenouille learned, so did we as readers. N0t that I would be in a position to criticise, but it seemed very legitimate and accurately described.

The writing of Grenouille was clever - he was presented as a genius, a psychopath and a repellent man, but all the more fascinating for it. We see his disdain for mankind, his feelings of superiority, and his rapid learning, and his manipulations using scent. Either the translation is brilliant, or the writing and translation are very good!

And one minor quibble - long paragraphs. I am generally not a fan of long paragraphs, and some of them in this book get a bit long-winded. I don't resent them when they suit the tone (which most of them do) - for example the breathless learning of something that take effort to explain, but long for the want of some editorial tidying I dislike. Only a minor quibble here though.

And so to the ending (no spoilers), while it was sudden and I see other reviewers were disappointed, I thought it fitting, and ultimately Grenouille achieves all he can imagine.

Some quotes I enjoyed:

n  In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

-

He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.

-

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, so there was no human activity,either destructive or constructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life, that was not accompanied by stench.n

4 stars.

average french person activities

This book had me like...


Unlike anything I've ever read, but I loved it. Especially the whole last chapter had me laughing morbidly at scenes the author probably did not intend to be satire. The circumstances of Jean-Baptiste's birth and upbringing were also hilariously awful to me.
During the rest of the book my general reaction was this:


I wasn't sure if I was gonna be sent straight to hell for rooting for the main character so I tried to keep my opinion out of the general reading process. (I say this because Jean-Baptiste murders several innocent people and despises every person he meets in the entire story. Not a role model.)

Overall, good book, not for the faint of heart.

Гренуй и историята му са уникални!

Imagine if Grenouille had lost his sense of smell to corona... Would he have become a decent person instead of a monster?

Just a random thought as I am reflecting on the fact that I miss the days when I could smell coffee in the entire house. These days I have to get very, very close... The world is full of strange things that we do not notice until they are gone.