Book Review: Perfume by Patrick Suskind

So it has been a while since I posted a book review and I thought I'd post a little something about a book I have recently read. This is a book that my partner bought for me and I initially felt quite excited by the premise: In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift — an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume" — the scent of a beautiful young virgin.

I thought I'd love this book. I love perfume. I love crime fiction and murder and dark characters. In all honesty, I was so let down by this book. I found the first 150 or so pages to be very slow and I hoped it would lead to a thrilling climax. Well, there is a climax but it's just bizarre. I won't spoil it for you but things go from 0 to 100 very quickly.

I think I'm mostly disappointed because the blurb and cover made it seem like it would be far more sensual, I somewhat envisaged a situation quite like the poem Porphyria's Lover, a poem about a man who loves his partner so much and feels so much for her that in a moment of passion he kills her so that, in a way, she is always his and always young and beautiful. It's messed up but it's one of my favourite poems. I somewhat expected something like that: that our unhappy protagonist, Grenouille, is harvesting the scents of these women to capture their innocence and that it would be more about his selection and pursuits of these women.

The book focuses a lot on the craft of extracting scents from natural substances and how perfume is made. We only really get to a lot of the murders near the end of the book and alas - most of it we don't get a lot of detail about.

What I can say is that the book has probably one of the best opening lines of any book I've ever read. It just wasn't what I expected. I've read it. I don't think I'd ever read it again.