Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

One thing I have been doing much less of since I started having to drive to work is reading. In fact, I still do read a lot but I tend to find that I read more magazine articles and short stories than novels and larger books. I think the other factor that has come into play is that my eyesight is getting that much worse that reading the small print of a paperback is actually rather tiring. I have tried playing audio books in the car but for some reason I find this very distracting whilst driving - I find the same effect with radio-plays. For this reason, any paperbacks I have read have lasted for weeks or even months with a couple of chapters at a time being read. One case in point is Patrick Süskind's  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer which I finished last week. This has taken me around 3 months to read (on and off) although it has actually been much longer than that in reality.

I was vaguely aware of Süskind's  Perfume as it had been referenced in songs by the likes of Nirvana and Rammstein. My wife is a big fan of the book so when the film version came out in 2006 we went to see it at the MacRoberts Cinema at Stirling University. Interestingly, for a German film of a German book, it was filmed in English with a largely British lead cast (Dustin Hoffman aside). I was suitably impressed by the film and started to read my way through my wife's edition of Das Parfum. I think I made it through the first two chapters and felt quite proud of myself at having read some German literature for a change. I then realised that I had no idea what had happened in the few pages that I had deciphered. There is a big difference in being able to garner information from a German motoring magazine or the set-up instructions for an electronic gadget and actually being able to absorb the nuances of an unusual historical novel.

Last year, Nina bought me the English language version in paperback - Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. At least, she bought me a second hand copy from Amazon market place which had previously been owned by someone with some kind of nasal infection (as far as I could tell)  but the text was intact and very much a revelation. Perfume tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a perfume apprentice in 18th century France who has an extremely sensitive sense of smell despite having no scent of his own. The story follows the isolated world of Grenouille as he explores the world via the sense of smell, eventually trying to isolate the perfect scent, that of a young virginal woman by murderous means.

Perfume is a very strange story told in an unusual and intriguing way. Telling the story of an odyssey of scent is difficult but the power of words allows this - and it also indicates why the German version was utterly lost on me. I would highly recommend the book but, if your eyesight is as mediocre as my own, I also loved the film version - there are some minor differences from the book but it's well worth catching if it is on.