(Spoilers for the story, and for NSFW language, including profanity, descriptions of murder, incest, and extremely disgusting topics).

I started this book at midnight on the same day as I watched the film adaptation. At midnight 24 hours later, I’d finished reading. This book was an unforgettable experience and weeks later, I still can’t stop thinking about it. I was also in awe of its complexity, even in translation. It’s simultaneously a straightforward, narratively-driven tale of a perfume-genius murderer with elements of magic realism; an historical reimagining of the scents and social disorder of 18th C Paris; a parody of a Christological narrative; a satire of beliefs about genius; and a psychological portrait of a murderer, focusing on the technical perfume-making aspects of this question with a total disinterest in the finer points of murdering. The killing is literally a club to the head, while what happens to the bodies afterwards is a highly refined process, which also works as a suitable metaphor for the textual preoccupations.

While I had the vague sense that a lot of the context was flying over my head in translation, I didn’t recognize even half of the metatextual layers that are apparently present. What is completely opaque to an English reader is that the book is, in its original language, a pastiche and parody of canonical German and French novels, sometimes to the extent of even borrowing their turns of phrase. Through other cannier (and German and French speaking reviewers) I learned that its descriptions of Paris riff on Baudelaire and Rike’s Malte Lauridis Brigge I have read – for shame! How-tos of perfume-making echo Baudelaire and Huysmans in their word choice. The main character Grenouille is an iteration of antiheroic types such as Dracula and Melmoth the Wanderer. Father Terrier’s early monologue about the infant Grenouille’s status of salvation or damnation is a take a similar monologue in Faust. Grenouille shouting at nature in a rainstorm during his seven-year stint hanging out in a cave in the wilderness? I called Plato with undertones of Jesus’s forty-day temptation in the desert: there’s even a scene where Grenouille gloats over the vastness of earthly kingdom, needing no devil to tempt him into claiming this power as prince of Earth.  But apparently Grenouille’s theatrics are additionally familiar to anyone stepped in the German romantic poetic tradition of sublime nature, as original German readers of the 80s would have been. A reviewer describes that the metaphor deployed through the text, Grenouille as a tick who parasitically latches himself onto various characters extracting what he needs from them, applies to the text at a meta-sense as well. (See Neil H Donahue’s article “Scents and Insensibility” for more on this). Suskind sucks these referential texts dry until they are only forms, transforming their lifeblood into something outside their original contexts and meanings. Which also makes it analogical to the central process and obsession of the novel, perfume-making.

What fascinates me about this novel is the way it uses a murder plot to advance a story of artistic triumph. Which essentially corrupts the worthiness of that artistic triumph itself: it’s an art that sacrifices everything, even human life, for its creation. And the novel’s prose doesn’t clearly signal these subversive intentions at first. It’s compulsively readable, deceptively straightforward in the manner of an historical thriller. I – and I think most North Americans – tend to expect parody will announce itself with a wink and a nod, a bit too much hyperbole to take seriously. But in retrospect, its description of the excessively grim, disgusting, and cruel conditions of Paris of the 1730s hides satire behind historicity right from the start. Suskind writes that Grenouille is a product of his time, that a monster like him was only possible in such a cruel, indifferent, and stench-filled place and time. His poor and unmarried mother squats beneath her fishmonger’s stall to birth Grenouille, then shoves the infant’s body aside with the fish-guts, expecting him to be stillborn like her other four infants had been. Subsequently, she is hanged for her crime of neglecting an illegitimate infant she did not know was alive. It seems parodic of a miraculous virgin birth, a deliberate inversion of tropes of purity, and divine love incarnate. The parody is subtle: it isn’t mocking Grenouille’s mother’s circumstances or actions. If anything seems absurd about the situation, it’s the description of Paris’s child welfare laws that follows: Paris law would sentence a woman to death for letting her infant die, even though nine out of ten (!) illegitimate children placed in public or church orphanages died annually.

As the plot progresses, its satire begins to announce itself more overtly. For example, an amateur scientist studies the grown-up Grenouille after a seven-year stint in the wilderness leaves him undernourished. The Marquis de La Taillade-Espinasse has an absolutely nonsensical hypotheses about rehabilitation through high-altitude-grown foods, which he thinks are healthy and regenerative because of the purity of the upper regions of earth, removed from the toxic effects of invisible fluids at the surface (please, nobody give this book to the Q-anon-ers). This is seemingly based on Aristotelian physics of “natural place” that would have already been outmoded in the 18th C. The Marquis’s previous scientific endeavours are even more ludicrous – they involve trying to create an “animal-vegetable hybrid” by spreading bull semen across his fields to germinate a sort of plant-nourished cheese (shudder), “described by the Academy of Science of Lyon as ‘tasting of goat, though slightly bitter.’” (144) Ew. And again, EW. So, he’s not quite spreading literal bullshit, but the farcical seriousness of his disgusting pursuit is somehow even worse.

The novel has layers of satire, from these small comic asides to, well, the entire plot. It can be read as a satire of the valorization of genius, appropriating romantic tropes of heroism and the alienated artist. Grenouille, the hero, is a total misfit in a cruel world, overcoming ridiculous adversity to emerge triumphant through his force of will. But just because he possesses the ability to create works of perfumery brilliance doesn’t mean what he achieves is good in any moral sense. Rather than a noble heroic figure whose artistic triumph is a deserved reward for his good character and perseverance through difficulty, the text consistently characterizes him as a devilish ‘abomination’ from the time he is a newborn infant. He’s unlikable and not that sympathetic, but he is consistently fascinating, as dehumanized monsters tend to be. The best thing he does, and this is admittedly a pathetic sort of ‘goodness,’ is make nice-smelling perfumes that make his employer rich.

In secret, he’s far prouder of making a perfume out of cheese and cat-shit, because it lets him blend in with the crowd of reeking humanity. Grenouille, physically, is this slight, scarred, ghost-like, undetectable presence. He makes everyone around him nervous when they notice him, because he doesn’t announce himself with a smell. This is until he develops a perfume – several perfumes, for various circumstances, depending on what emotional response he wants to elicit from others – that conceals him as just another reeking human. This magical element underlines that this isn’t the story of a normal man led morally astray. He’s a purpose-built literary monster. And at his moment of greatest triumph, he’s able to achieve a pinnacle of perfume mastery because he also has no human moral qualms which would have gotten in the way of his artistic pursuit. He perceives no real difference between a fresh harvest of jonquil flowers and red-haired woman at the peak of her adolescent beauty. They are both ingredients there for him to use. When Grenouille finally succeeds in killing his prize ingredient, the girl Laure, then focuses his attentions on the process of turning her into a pomade, there isn’t any hesitation, revulsion, fear, or moral compunction in his thought-process.

This is grotesque thinking. But the novel highlights the way romantic tropes of triumphant genius are themselves perverse. The pursuit of genius obviously has human and ethical limits, and how far we’re willing to follow Grenouille in his monosensual passion is a bit indicting of ourselves. We might be happy that he has finally been given a chance to flourish in the perfume shop that rescues him from slavery in a tannery; feel disgusted at his cheese and cat-shit perfume; and react with horror as he murders a woman for the first time just to smell her more completely, neck to navel to groin to feet. But for some readers, all that’s just, y’know, what genius demands! In other Goodreads reviews you’ll see people arguing that Grenouille’s story is primarily a story of genius succeeding at any cost, that the murdering of some random women really isn’t what it’s about. Fuck those women – it was their fault for smelling so nice, and they’re in a better place now, namely, a perfume bottle in the hands of a male genius. That’s the thing about parody; in the wrong hands, it can be read uncritically. But are any of the seemingly sincere textual meditations on the nature of genius intended to be taken straightforwardly? Or is Suskind consistently making fun of the idea that single-minded pursuit of artistic excellence forgives all other sins?

The status of the book as satire, and a satire throughout, opens up another provoking question from within the text. Is there a single monster here, or is this a tale of monstrous attitudes and how they come to be through historical circumstances? I could point to several examples of grotesque attitudes enabled through poverty and human cruelty in the novel. However, it is Monsieur Richis, father of Grenouille’s final murder victim Laure, is the best example of what I mean.

Richis is preoccupied with the material legacies of his fortune and lineage, to just about the same extent Grenouille is obsessed with perfume. He sees his gorgeous daughter Laure as just one more facet of his legacy which he must manage for his own gain. In one particularly disgusting passage, Richis, thinking of his daughter’s incredible beauty, regrets that he is related to her and therefore cannot sleep with her. These sentences were, in fact, harder for me to read than any coldly detached description of Grenouille applying pomade to linens in advance of the dead female body that would infuse them with its essence. Richis’s plan to outsmart Grenouille, who he suspects is coming for Laure next, would have been to marry her off to a member of the nobility. Grenouille only murders virgins, and as soon as Laure is married, she won’t be a potential victim. The marriage contract Richis drafts even specifies that consummation must occur on the wedding night. (This is absolutely a “magical virginity” trope in action, since no longer being a virgin will supposedly change Laure’s desirable scent. But the intention here is primarily to establish that the serial killer has no sexual interest in his victims. Examination of their bodies shows no traces of his semen). The film adaptation gives us some lines from Laure about how she’s miserable with the arrangement and wants a love-match. But in my opinion, this misses the smothering, depersonalizing effect of the text. In the novel, Laure is totally silenced by her father. Her individual thoughts and desires do not figure into the future he arranges for her any more than they figure into Grenouille’s plans for her murder. It’s monstrousness of a different, patriarchal order but unsettling just the same.

In the poetic logic which underpins this novel, common-sense – forgive the pun – is really common-scent. Smelling like something, even something more like B.O. than violet-water, is associated with an essential, flawed but undeniable humanity. This humanity might be dumb – led around by its nose quite literally – but nevertheless scent is a source of pre-rational knowledge for common people. The information they learn through their noses has the status of moral knowledge which they believe unquestioningly. Sometimes they are wrong about this knowledge. But it’s not so simple as detaching yourself from the senses through rationality, either, to be too smart to follow your nose. Every character who possesses an excess of theology, or scientific theory, or is oblivious to how much scent affects their judgment, makes terrible errors by doing so.

We see this clearly in the second chapter, in the dialogue between Father Terrier, who runs the parish where the infant Grenouille is delivered, and the nursemaid who’s arrived to protest she will no longer feed the baby. “He’s possessed by the devil,” she says, and she’s right. She’s sniffed it out of him: he doesn’t smell like anything, and that’s just plain wrong. Refusing to believe her, Father Terrier bullshits some nonsense about how children, having no sin, also have no smell. Of course, having smelled absolutely no children in the rest of his life, this is an ad-hoc post-rationalization driven by his ego. And Father Terrier is also prone to having his head turned by scent-based sensuality, a fact he is unconscious of. The aroma of milk soaking the wet nurse’s wool garments produces grossly uncomfortable flights of fancy for him (I swear, the thoughts in men’s heads about their desire for women in this novel are consistently more disturbing than its descriptions of murders). Terrier wonders what his life might have been like had he married and settled down with a child of his own, if the baby in his arms were really his.

Meanwhile, what should babies smell like? Does the wet nurse, a poor woman from the Rue Saint-Denis, actually think she knows better than a priest whether a child is “of the devil” or not? No, that’s for the priests to say, she replies. In response to the question of “what does a baby smell like when he smells the way you think he ought to smell?” Her response is, at first, simply “good,” and then, when pressed, she descends into obvious yet imaginative particularities. Their feet smell like fresh butter; their bodies like a griddle cake soaked in milk. Their heads smell sweet, “like caramel.” Father Terrier tells the woman that she’s talking nonsense, that he knows better than her, and what’s more, she admits to never having actually tasted caramel but having smelled it as it was made.

Father Terrier sends her away, thinking of how impossible it would be that the devil could be sniffed out by a lowly wet nurse’s nose: “With the primitive organ of smell, the basest of the senses! As if hell smelled of sulfur and paradise of incense and myrrh!” He talks about scent-knowledge as “the worst sort of superstition, straight out of the darkest days of paganism,” so primitive that it accompanied sacrifice to imaginary gods reeking of fat and blood. And then Father Terrier notices the infant Grenouille sniffing at him and is embarrassed at what he must smell like: “And all at once he felt as if he stank, of sweat and vinegar, of choucroute and unwashed clothes. He felt naked and ugly, as if someone were gaping at him while revealing nothing of himself. The child seemed to be smelling right through his skin, into his innards. His most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed to that greedy little nose[…]” (15) Father Terrier’s so freaked out that he dumps the child at the nearest orphanage. Not that he admits to anyone that the wet-nurse was, in the end, right. Not that he admits to himself that by his reaction, he does believe, like the wet-nurse, that scent betrays some true essence of self, as foolishly as any pagan.

But neither is the nose always reliable. A genius can circumvent that, as Grenouille does in his moment of climactic triumph. The novel’s parody ramps up to un-ignorable levels at its conclusion, in which Grenouille turns himself into Perfume Jesus at the scene of his own crucifixion, where he’s about to be beaten to death on a cross for the murders he’s committed. After dabbing on his perfume made of the essences of the 24 virgins he’s clubbed over the head and turned into pomade, he is led to the St. Andrew’s cross at the scene of his would-be capital punishment. The crowd, after they get a whiff, turn on an olfactory whim: “he could not be a murderer. The man who stood at the scaffold was innocence personified.” (244) They scream, clap, are overcome by passionate love, and then descend into a literal mass orgy at the foot of the scaffold. Reading this is a totally WTF experience. You’d think that a mass orgy would be satisfying to read about, or at least titillating or entertaining, but it’s somehow completely not any of those things. The novel thwarts even the pleasure of unbounded concupisence by making it seem ridiculous and farcical: a painfully self-conscious “and then everybody clapped and laid down and had an orgy” moment played for what seems like an intentional cringe-effect. The man who is supposed to break Grenouille’s limbs falls down weeping at his feet. Laure’s father, who’s spent a portion of the previous chapter soliloquizing about his thirst for Grenouille’s suffering before he dies, calls Grenouille his son and kisses him.

If you’re reading this only at a surface level of narrative, the story falls apart at that point in terms of its ability to satisfy. It’s impossible to take seriously, coming across as jarring and schlocky even if you know it’s headed in some kind of parodic direction. Before the crowd smells Grenouille’s Eau du Virgin, they’re calling for his head (appropriate, for a character named after John the Baptist). And after they smell that perfume – who cares about murdered virgins? They may know what they know with their noses in complete defiance of all their rational knowledge, which understands Grenouille is a serial-killer of young women, but what they know is, in one sense (pun intended!) true. Grenouille reeks of innocence and beauty. Even if it was achieved through grotesque technical mastery that mocks the very concepts of innocence and beauty.

Grenouille, having escaped his punishment, chooses to throw himself to the poorest fishmongers of Paris after dousing himself in the rest of his miraculous perfume. They descend upon him, tearing him apart and devouring his body, a cannibalistic parody of Christian communion. And while the text facetiously redeems them: “Though the meal lay rather heavy on their stomachs, their hearts were definitely light. All of a sudden there were delightful, bright flutterings in their dark souls. And on their faces was a delicate, virginal glow of happiness,” its implications are pure sacrilege. The people who tore Grenouille limb from limb aren’t elevated by the incredible art they’ve just consumed. The innocence of the victims that’s gone into making it hasn’t redeemed them. They’re a pack of murderers celebrating a murderer and replicating his act of murder in the process. While giving an artist the highest tribute: being so boundlessly passionate about his work that they lose their minds, and, in replicating his act of mastery over nature, destroy it, and him. The conclusion is absolutely blasphemous, and strangely thrilling.

It turns out that the pre-rationality of scent, while sometimes unmasking the supposedly wise as foolish in their own way, can’t be fully trusted, either. If the novel is advancing any idea consistently, it’s the postmodern idea that both embodied and intellectual knowledge are unstable. Rational thought is time-bound by the foundational beliefs of the day, prone to selfishness and bias. Pre-rational thought runs the risk of ignoring obvious truths and is especially susceptible to manipulative genius using gut-instinct-following fools to achieve their own ends. The fool truly is led around by their nose, yet more refined sorts of fools over-intellectualize their senses at their own peril.

Review originally published on Goodreads on July 21, 2021