My favourite book of 2025
review
No spoilers!
Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.
Perfume is a historical fantasy novel that explores smell. Scent is an interesting sense: it is fleeting and temporary. When something happens, it leaves some discernible visual mark in history, either literally or as an image in memory. Our sense of time is also tied to vision. We do not know that someone has arrived until they are physically at a place. Until they are observed to be at a place. Smelling someone allows you to anticipate someone coming. In a way, it is slightly ahead of reality.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is very good at smells. He was born in 18th-century France with a superhuman sense of smell and no scent of his own. In a place and time noted for its stink, he is marked as an outsider.
He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
Patrick SĂźskind constantly commingles the factual and the fantastical. We open with a book grounded in the filth and poverty of Paris. Life is overwhelmingly physical. In parallel, Grenouille’s journey is described with a fairy-tale quality. The narrator speaks with an almost sing-song rhythm. The violence is a sharp contrast, but also very in line with a German fable.
The novel follows his rise as a perfumer. Grenouille is not a creator in the traditional sense. He cannot produce scent from within himself; he can only extract and steal it.
He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.
He is the ultimate consumer: a being who experiences the world with unparalleled intensity yet contributes nothing back to it. In this way, Perfume becomes a meditation on aesthetics. What does it mean to create versus to consume? Grenouille is a parasitic artist who harvests beauty.