When one tells you that a movie is made based on the olfactory sense of humans, I was in doubt. But after watching Perfume the film, it satisfied my nosetrils and the whole darkly rich but sinister effluvium of the craft of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the survivor, the genius, the perfumer, and the murderer. But my curiosity left me craving for more and left me with one singular question: what would it feel like reading a book based on scents and fragrances? Would the writer be able to convey and tickle the olfactory sense through the use of words? And so it was, I ogled at the book in which all the sensation was all about.

Perfume: A Story of a Murderer by German author Patrick Suskind is a wonderful piece of craft, one that is terrifyingly novel and at the same time a masterpiece worth to be inhaled as if the words are made out of incenses. It's a very interesting book, asdie from the fact that it features such an original character, so despicable yet hauntingly mysterious in the form of a misanthropic peerless freak which was Grenouille, its startingly exciting narrative stimulates the sense indeed with a kind of prose both gruesome yet poetic. This is a beautifully and darkly written book. Never in my life have I read a book that is filled with words that could transport you into another dimension where imagination is suffused with scents, fragrances, odours both putrid and lovable.

Of course we all know the story; about an orphan who was blessed with an incredible (a bit messianic) talent - his ability to perceive the different smells of the world. He grows up learning different odours and materially dividing them into components, that it helped him to speak words. His ultimate goal was survival, and as he entered into the once horribly smelly city of Paris, he was hired as an assistant to the renowned but losing-touch perfumer Baldini. There he proved himself that his nose was "the best nose all over Paris" and concocted the very difficult to breakdown "Amor & Psyche". But his manipulation was clever, he was obsessed with capturing every scent there is available in the world and when he succeeded, there was one scent he could not capture - the smell of pure, unadulterated beauty. He discovered his maniacal obsession to the scent of young virgins. His crisis lead him to travel into the mountains and detached himself from the world, also learning that he, himself, has no scent which means his existence was unimportant. But this drove him to the town of Grasse where he fulfilled his wrath of a masterpiece, collecting essences of virgins, killing young women and capturing their very cores, serving as bases on his perfume. Also in Grasse, there was this woman whom he was obsessed with, with a scent that was most beautiful and haunting that even the Gods would kneel for it, and he had done everything to capture this very last scent, this very last note to perfect his ultimate masterpiece.

It's a very bizzare book, probably read by only those who are patient and are attracted to novel things such as poetic proses and captivating stories. No doubt, Perfume is a tour-de-force; it's diabolical, gruesome and a significant character study about ambition, obsession and one's dream to prove one's existence to the world. It's also very unique because in a world that's full of literary heroes, here's Grenouille who broke the rules: he's an anti-hero, and never in the face of fiction had a villain been put so brilliantly in the protagonist position since the deliberate and chilling study of Hannibal Lecter. A must-read, this one.


Rating: A