words by Jocelyn Howarth

There is a widely circulated myth that we, as humans, only use 10% of our brains and that the remaining 90% holds immense untapped potential. Although this is not actually true, the notion is tantalising. How much of our body’s capabilities do we actually use? In Perfume, Patrick Süskind imagines a world in which everyone is only using a small fraction of their nose’s purpose, while the protagonist, Grenouille, has access to the full palette of his sense of smell, vastly superior to everyone else’s. Grenouille can identify every note in even the most complex of perfumes, can track people through the streets of Paris, and even know how many people are in a room purely through the use of his nose. It is a superpower, but for Grenouille it is also a curse.

What is most peculiar about Grenouille’s character, established at the very beginning when he is just a baby, is that he is odourless. His wet nurse brings him to a monk and proclaims that Grenouille is "possessed by the devil", for he smells of absolutely nothing whatsoever. Süskind draws connections between scent and identity very clearly throughout the novel. Grenouille’s nose and observations are our lead into understanding how smells reflect different people, including Grenouille himself. Not only does he lack a scent, he also lacks any sort of humanity. This is not just a story about scent; it is The Story of a Murderer. What type of person does one have to be to become a murderer? Grenouille grows up experiencing no feelings towards other people, no desire to make friends or have a family, no love for anyone, not even himself. He is described by Süskind as a tick who “gave the world nothing but his dung – no smile, no cry, no glimmer in the eye, not even his own scent”. People do not notice him when he passes them by on the street or when he enters a room. As much as Grenouille is aware of everyone all the time, no one is ever aware of him. He moves around France like a ghost and comes to turn this to his advantage when his career as a murderer begins.

Imagine the suffering that would come with such an acute sense of smell. I, for one, get overstimulated when my candle has been burning in my room for too long. To be raised in stinking 18th century Paris with the keenest nose in the world would be something akin to torture. Indeed, when Grenouille finally leaves Paris, he ends up hibernating in the mountains for almost a decade, liberated by the clean, scentless air. However, being overwhelmed is not the only way Grenouille’s ability curses him. When he catches a whiff of a scent he does like, one he notices on two young girls, he becomes utterly captivated by it; captivated to the point of obsession, obsessed to the point of possession. His desire to own the scent takes over, and he becomes a perfumer’s apprentice to learn all the ways of distilling perfumes, going to great lengths to learn the most effective extraction technique, enfleurage. This overwhelming need to possess that scent is the only true emotion that Grenouille feels, if it can even be considered an emotion. It becomes his driving force throughout the novel “[f]or he had renounced things all his life. But never once had he possessed and lost.” It is not just the scent itself that he is obsessed with. The effect of irrepressible attraction it holds for him is one he wishes to replicate in others. He has fantasies of an “incomparable Empire of Grenouille”, labelling himself “Grenouille the Great”, the “omnipotent god of scent”. Having gone through so much of his life with no body odour of his own, no human habits, and therefore no real identity–”he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was”–this precious scent is his key to power.

To my surprise, I really liked this book. I word it like that because I had a niggling feeling that, despite the back cover’s bold promises of perfumes, desire, and death, it would end up being slow and dry, as I have repeatedly experienced with other books in the past. But truth be told, it was the opposite. I was engaged from the very first line and my attention did not waiver until the end. Even the slower parts were packed full of intriguing information, whether it be detailed descriptions about scents or a deep dive into extraction techniques. Grenouille, despite having an utterly unrelatable sociopathic personality, was a fascinating persona to follow, a cursed character who brings darkness to anyone involved with him. He is uneasy to witness, his violence jarring yet so calculated and cold that it’s hard to truly hate him, though immensely easy to be disgusted by him. A small part of me even pitied him, too.

Needless to say, there are both good and bad scents, and all are described in such detail that it makes you think Süskind himself might closely relate to Grenouille’s obsession. There were many instances where the language made me shudder or grimace – admittedly, I’m an expressive reader, but I reckon even the most stoic of readers would curl their lip at the frank and unabashed descriptions reflecting Grenouille’s lack of shame or embarrassment. One  which I must share is: “with legs spread wide and exuding a cloud of spermy odour”. Gross, so gross that I just had to keep reading because who on earth writes such a disgusting line and continues as if nothing out of the ordinary happened? I resonated with Grenouille at times, greedily reading as fast as I could, devouring the descriptions of sewage and body odour and jasmine (my favourite flower) just like our unnerving protagonist devours his precious scent. It’s dark and twisted and visceral and completely absorbing.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to literally anyone except children. Whatever you normally like to read, put the next book on your TBR aside and pick this one up instead. Let yourself be absorbed in this freaky story and confront the way you experience smells. All senses can link us to emotion, but in my opinion our sense of smell is best at achieving that, transporting us to times in our past, triggering old emotions, remembering the faces of people you haven’t seen in five, ten, twenty years. Scent is the ultimate path to nostalgia: a madeleine de Proust. Scent is a key to identity. Don’t you love how a new book smells? Or how your dog smells after a groom, tail wagging in joy? How about that first coffee at 6 a.m. getting you ready for your day? Süskind investigates all of this while taking us on the strange journey of a man who experiences that sense with infinitely greater strength, ultimately declaring that you can indeed have too much of a good thing.