|
August, 2000 As you might imagine, Jolique's house is piled high with books on every subject—art, philosophy, poetry, drama, and fiction of all kinds. In her opinion, there are few things better than a good book, a comfy sofa and a glass of wine on a cold day (except perhaps a hot man and a warm bed!). Although she is constantly feeding her bookworm habit by reading new books, she often re-reads many of her favorites, and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Süskind, is no exception. Jolique read this book more than ten years ago, and this week, she dusted off the dustcover once again. Unless you've read a few of Jolique's articles on perfume and how it's made (see The Flora and Fauna of Essential Oils or Chemistry and Alchemy: Turning the Real Into the Ethereal), you will not fully appreciate this book. But after reading several books on perfume-making, its history and how we smell, Jolique had a better appreciation for Perfume, and its main character, the evil and creepy Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. |
|
 |
Perfume is set in 18th century Paris, a time and place of unimaginable stench. It was a time when streets were sewers, reeking of defecation, disease and decay, a time when people rarely bathed, not because they were averse to cleanliness, but because they were so afraid of contracting syphilis, hepatitis, the Plague or any other of a whole host of contagions that lurked in the city's murky water supply. |
|
It was a time when having a full set of teeth and a face that wasn't riddled with small pox scars was so unusual as to be considered beautiful. People stank. Their neighbors stank. Their dogs stank. The trees stank. Now in the midst of all of this awful offal, imagine was born a baby boy—the ugliest baby the world had ever seen—with the keenest sense of smell the world had ever known. Such is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Born to a fish gutter and left for dead, Grenouille is a survivor from the first day of his life. Passed from one wet nurse to the other, he's continuously rejected for the peculiar fact that he possesses no odor. "He doesn't smell like other babies," they say. Other babies smell like "fresh butter and cream and curds and caramel." But Grenouille smells like nothing at all. And yet he smells. No odor—not the faintest aroma of crisp bacon from a boucherie six blocks away, or the lavender-scented sheets in a marquise's boudoir in Montparnasse—passes underneath his monstrous, porcine nostrils without first being identified and catalogued. Next >>> |
|
