Book Review – Patrick Suskind – Perfume – The Story Of A Murderer

1985 Penguin Books. Translated from the German by John E Woods.

Spoiler Alerts.

The Perfume book cover.

A Beer & Books Book Club Read – Vinyl Tap, Preston Monthly Book Club. 12th February 2026.

Few books can claim to be truly unique, but this may be one of the few to qualify.

In creative writing classes, a frequent exercise is telling a story using all five senses, sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Most book writers will make occasional reference to the latter three but carry most of their narratives with the seen and heard. Perfume is primarily an olfactory novel. Suskind uses scent and smell with such exquisite detail you feel as if you scent it all too.

The central character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is an orphan born uniquely with no aroma whatsoever, dumped at the instant of birth, in the reeking slum district fish-market streets of Pre-Revolution Paris. As he grows, he develops a superhuman keen-ness of smell, but he is more supervillain than superhero. He quickly learns to despise people, and his lack of detectable essence makes everyone distance themselves from him. He is a twisted hunchback who never experiences love. How much of his stance on life is human nature? How much is his nurturing?

He does discover a young girl with an exquisite aroma, but he kills her in his efforts to attain it, and he will be haunted by a passion to recapture the scent of her again as the book and his life go on. His fixation on the girl’s scent is necrophilic. He remains with her corpse until the smell of her fades away.

Grenouille gets an apprenticeship to a master perfumier, Baldini, in what for me is the strongest section of the book, as apprentice proves more knowledgeable that master, blending and replicating existing scents by instinct without any measuring cups or formula’s and set recipes to work from. Grenouille learns at least how to preserve scents captured.

It’s in these chapters that Suskind gives a sense of the beautiful scope of the sheer language of scents and his descriptions of them in the translation are staggering. This is a work of prose-poetry as much as a developing crime story.

Grenouille wants more than Baldini can teach him though. He seeks the ability to capture the nature of the sources of the scents, effectively taking a human soul, not just the aromas the people he encounters wear, or carry from materials and places they have been. He seeks back the magical scent of the perfect girl he destroyed. Baldini tells Grenouille that there are methods of capturing essences that he might learn from other perfumiers, and Grenouille sets out on a quest to master the methods of distillation, to go with the blending and mixing crafts he gained from Baldini.

Grenouille takes a long hermitage retreat in a distant cave, where he first realises his own total lack of such an essence. Grenouille travels France, coated in fake aromas to conceal the absence of a real one. He falls in with the Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse, who has notion of having a Frankenstein quality skill for creating fluidities, able to make people seem more or less than they are. He uses Grenouille as a test subject, giving the twisted aroma-less hunchback the status and illusionary appearance of a gentleman and aristocrat. Grenouille uses the disguise ability to go on a murder spree, killing twenty-five women in all, to capture their essences to distil into his most perfect scent essence, but after his last victim is claimed the authorities close in ready for one of the wildest endings to any fantasy or crime story ever.

Suskind blends words with similar mastery to the mixing of the perfumes. The story is beautifully constructed around a Dickensian quality anti-hero. It’s impossible to either love or hate Grenouille. Is he a monster? Is anything he did his fault? He is driven by his inner compulsions, unable to change the way he is, even when cunning enough to mask it. He never knows true love, and loathes humanity as much as they find his total lack of scent more appalling than their own sweat. What he will do in the end is an enormous revenge on everyone, forcing an acceptance, and compulsion on people while removing himself forever from our reach too.

There is an element of Christ allegory going on. Grenouille has a mysterious birth, performs miracles (his ability to smell over great distances), an enigmatic nature, a long sojourn in the wilderness (his time in the cave), his trial and near execution by people who love him, and want to be like him, and his final last supper sacrifice of his blood and flesh to the masses.

Women are rather objectified, as Grenouille searches for an essence in them that he craves but never truly attains. His first victim is a girl he kills unwittingly, like a cat kills a mouse playing with it but losing interest when it stops moving around any more. His later murders are more predatory. In having his madness absorbed by the people Paris in the Age Of Reason, Grenouille may well be the catalyst of the French Revolution and Reign Of Terror to come.

A wonderful, sometimes horrific darky satirical read, with a relish for the unlikely. Background characters meet unlikely ghastly fates when Suskind has no further need of them. Baldini for example is killed when his house collapses inexplicably into the Seine. One of the greatest novels of the 20^th century.

The 2006 film version, itself brilliant, is reviewed here by me. https://letterboxd.com/arthurchappell/film/perfume-the-story-of-a-murderer

Our next read - Augustina Bazterrica's The Unworthy - for 12th March 2026.

Photos by myself.

Arthur Chappell

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