this book sounded really interesting, but i really didn't like it. couldn't wait to be done with it, but also had a hard time just finishing it cause i really didn't like it. felt like the writing and plot was just very amateurish. hopefully the movie is better.

I was predisposed to love this book no matter what. I love perfumes. The fact that this book had blood and murder was just a bonus.

For me, perfumes and scents are a visceral thing. I love perfume. I have never been a visual person, my memories are composed of layers of scent.

I remember as a child, growing up in Vietnam, visiting my elderly neighbor's house and having him give me a cup of black tea infused with jasmine. Those jasmines would put the pitiful little star jasmines to shame. They were huge, each petal as wide as a fingernail. White, waxen, and filled with the most beautiful, deep, richly floral scent that even as a 5-year old I could feel was seductive without ever knowing the meaning or the existence of the word.

I remember sleeping with the window open, as the night air was filled with the scents of the flowering trees that grew outside my grandparents' house. I remember the green, earthy smell of the rice paddies where I grew up. I remember the bitter, smoky smell of the pits (so environmentally destructive, but whatever) that my neighbors dug in which they burned wood slowly for months to make a small supply of coal. Not all the smells were pleasant, of course, because hello, I did grow up on a farm, but my memories are built upon scent.

My love of perfume grew when I was a teen. I learned about perfumes, and how they were made. I learned about how flowers were distilled for their scents, an enormous quantity of raw ingredients required for a few precious drops of essential oils. I learned about making aromatic compounds in an organic chemistry lab, and that my beloved scent of jasmine (and tuberose) smelled as beautifully seductive and sexual as it did because it contained a compound called indoles, which smells like poop. Who knew!

I learned that each perfume as a top note, which quickly dissipates, the middle notes, which remains, the base notes, which lingers onto your skin like the touch of a long-gone lover. I learned that musk can smell rank, like sweaty, animalistic sex on top of a slice of Muenster cheese, or it can smell like the warmth of a mother's embrace.

There are certain scents I will never be able to wear again, because one I wore for months, while longing after a guy I thought I could never have. Another I can't smell without wincing, because it reminds me of heartbreak and tears, despite the fact that it came in a rose-colored bottle and smelled like green tea and lemons.

This book is a perfume lover's dream come true. The entire book could have had no mystery at all, and I would still read it and revel in the descriptions alone.

The Summary: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was a bastard, born in 1738 to a syphilitic, consumptive woman working in a stinking fish stall as a gutter. After delivering the unfortunate child, she was promptly arrested for abandoning said child, and hanged.

A most auspicious beginning.

Even in the beginning, his wet nurse---paid for by the state---noticed that something was wrong with Grenouille.

n  “I don’t mean what’s in the diaper. His soil smells, that’s true enough. But it’s the bastard himself, he doesn’t smell.”n

Babies have a smell, some stink, but underneath it, there's always a warm, cuddly smell that even a cold, heartless, child-hating woman such as I can appreciate. Grenouille has no scent.

People notice. His fellow children notice.

n  They could not stand the nonsmell of him. They were afraid of him.n

As a teen, he sought work at a tannery in Paris. Paris is a stinking pit of hell. To Grenouille...it is heaven, with its amalgamation of scents.

n  It was a mixture of human and animal smells, of water and stone and ashes and leather, of soap and fresh-baked bread and eggs boiled in vinegar, of noodles and smoothly polished brass, of sage and ale and tears, of grease and soggy straw and dry straw. Thousands upon thousands of odors formed an invisible gruel that filled the street ravines, only seldom evaporating above the rooftops and never from the ground below.n

Grenouille knew he was not normal, but his obsession for the pursuit of a scent never really gained traction until he committed his first murder, for love of a virgin's scent.

n  ...the sweat of her armpits, the oil in her hair, the fishy odor of her genitals, and smelled it all with the greatest pleasure. Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms... and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich, so balanced, so magical, that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless.n

The scent of a living human being that he must commit to memory, that he must capture, in the way a flower collector dries a specimen within parchment, in the way an insect lover kills and pins to a page the very thing he loves.

n  When she was dead he laid her on the ground among the plum pits, tore off her dress, and the stream of scent became a flood that inundated him with its fragrance. He thrust his face to her skin and swept his flared nostrils across her, from belly to breast, to neck, over her face and hair, and back to her belly, down to her genitals, to her thighs and white legs. He smelled her over from head to toe, he gathered up the last fragments of her scent under her chin, in her navel, and in the wrinkles inside her elbow.n

His is an obsessive quest that will lead him to murder again, and again, and again, in this desperate search.

n  Grenouille knew for certain that unless he possessed this scent, his life would have no meaning.n

This is a book in which the title is completely self-explanatory. It is about a murderer, and his obsessive quest for a perfect perfume. It's something I understand, in my constant search for the Holy Grail of fragrances.

But I have yet to succumb to the urge to murder. >_>

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).

If I could only have one word to describe this novel it would have to be "original". What an idea, what a concept Suskind came up with for this story, for this character. Fortunately I have more words available and I have to use them. Words like creepy, disgusting, sick, vile, etc. etc. It's the story of a serial killer in 18th century France. The victims - young girls, virgins. Predictable you say, well not so much. Sherlock Holmes would have struggled solving this case I believe. Very well written, but difficult to read in some parts.
4 stars

(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 )

Гренуй и историята му са уникални!

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

I had a heck of a time thinking who I'd recommend this to. It won a Fantasy award, yet I can't call it Fantasy. It's set in a bygone period, but it doesn't play with history, so it's not Historical Fiction. It's about a murder, yet it's not terrifying like Horror, nor is it a mystery. It's just the story of a peculiar boy who became a dangerous and most interesting man. He was born without an odor, you see, and lacking that part of identity, became obsessed with smell. That identity crisis triggers philosophical, religious and morbid chords in the book, yet none dominate. If anything, a dark curiosity dominates it. The book has a slightly menacing monotone about it that is almost hypnotic, and lays a surreal lens over the brilliant and crisp descriptions Suskind provides for his world. It's an angry, dangerous little book that baffled literary critics and inspired Nirvana. Read it and label it for yourself.

What begins with one of the most alluring opening lines soon spirals into a gorgeously twisted tale of death and strangeness, written and translated with staggering beauty. Perfume tells the tale of the 18th century French orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who slipped from his mother while she worked at a fish market and then promptly died. And while his beginnings are bleak, he soon grows into an unusual kind of monster.

Grenouille has the uncanny ability to identify smells from miles away. His nose is unnaturally attuned, and he will eventually kill for the smells he desires most. We watch him grow up, become apprentice to a perfumer in Paris, and eventually leave when he grows tired of other people. But the smells of certain women drive him to commit terrible crimes in this blend of historical fiction and poetic fantasy.

Perfume is a grotesque novel about the intersection between death and obsession, as well as the corruption of power and dominance. An unsavoury yet addictive work that proves to be an entirely compulsive read.

My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/best-historic...

Lo primero que quiero comentar es que este libro no es lo que yo esperaba. Pensé que sería un thriller trepidante, pero me encontré con un relato lento, que se centra en desgranar la psique del personaje principal y en narrar las circunstancias que lo acompañaron durante toda su vida, para que el lector pueda comprender su forma de pensar, actuar y ver el mundo. La verdad, también me gustan mucho ese tipo de libros, pero en el caso de El Perfume, el autor utiliza un estilo en exceso reiterativo, se detiene cada página a enumerar cosas sin importancia, alarga capítulos de forma absolutamente innecesaria y, al final, se transformó en una lectura muy tediosa, que acabé a pura fuerza de voluntad y que no me mantuvo enganchada en ningún momento; ni siquiera en aquellas partes por las que es más conocida esta obra y que ocupan menos del último tercio del libro.

No niego que el argumento es en extremo original y muchos aspectos te invitan a una reflexión bastante profunda, por lo que le doy las dos estrellas. Pero para mí la lectura tiene que ser una experiencia placentera y esta definitivamente no lo fue.

n  Reto #44 PopSugar 2017: Un libro que tenga lugar a lo largo de la vida de un personajen

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.

Read as part of The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003.

The first thing I want to say is that, even though I didn't really enjoy it, I do fully recommend you read this book. It has a wonderful concept and will make you think so much about a lot of things-life, people, senses, smells, the way you see the world-that I think the enjoyment of the story is a little unimportant.

This is the story of a late-Seventeenth-Century French man who is born with an extraordinarily sensitive sense of smell, but does not smell of anything himself. This unusual concept means the whole story is wrapped tightly around the theme of smell: all about it, smelling it, knowing it, seeing it, wanting it and remembering it.

I did want to enjoy this book and I thought the beginning was quite wonderful. It really set up the themes of the book, and the plot, and the character, to such an extent I went through it with hope. Sadly, it falls away quite dramatically. It was unapologetically brutal and harsh; brash, brazen, quick, dark. The ending in particular I found exceedingly pointless, though I think that the ending itself was appropriate not only for the character but also, metaphorically, for the book, too. It was a disappointing ending, but I thought it very fitting that it were as abrupt as it was.

The concept of a man seeing the world and everything within it as smells is wonderful but I don't think it was executed to its full potential. In fact, I think it was so mis-used that it left the work a bit hollow at the end. Grenouille doesn't think like other people and as a result he is a social outcast, which both hinders and emphasises his talent for smelling. He sees everything as smells and, through him, we do, too. But I think there were many times when we didn't get the full sense of what he was smelling: I wasn't convinced of some of the smells-the description of a place-it wasn't evocative to me. Perhaps because I don't have as powerful nose as others, or perhaps because I'm a visual person, but there were times when it didn't read as wonderful descriptions of people and places in the medium of smell, but instead was just an obvious statement of what had already been described before. Unfortunately, Grenouille and other characters are neither likeable nor particular fleshed out. Even though I believe the 2D nature of the characters was done on purpose to illustrate Grenouille's own view of human beings, the fact that the book was in 3rd Person narrative meant it was felt wholly.

What I didn't like was the idea that virginity is something so utterly important that it has a special kind of scent. This is such a man idea of what virginity is-and weird from a character that has no concept of religion and god-that, whilst the idea of sexual desires and senses is intriguing, it holds no bearing on virginity and the act of losing it. It has nothing to do with puberty, with the beginning of the menstrual cycle or the end of it. It is simply a bit of skin that, quite often, isn't even there. Whilst I understand the concept of the need for virginal scent in this character, the whole idea really infuriated me, particularly considering this was written in the 80s and not, in fact, in the 18th century: you can have ideas of what virginity is in the 18th century but you cannot alter the proven fact: the scent of it. That made no sense. It probably shouldn't have annoyed me so much, but it did, and the book lost a lotof it's meaning. The obvious sexual themes of the book-wherein Grenouille uses smells as a proxy for sex, intimacy and other such things-were rendered completely meaningless by this, despite their intrigue.

The other things, the art of perfume making, the way Paris smelt back then, the way a man can lose himself in a hole completely, all felt a little lacklustre and simply ways to make the story get to where it was heading, as opposed to being part of a journey. It is a wonderful concept and I really enjoyed that part of it, but otherwise it was just another bloody book.


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