SÜNSKIND, Patrick. Perfume: The story of a murderer. Reprinted edition.

Editora
Vintage Books USA, 2001.

This book relates the story of the personage Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a gifted
person who was born amidst the rot of a fish market in eighteenth-century France, where his
mother worked as a saleswoman. She didn’t give him any attention, then he was supposed to
die in his first minutes of life, but he didn’t, and started to cry, making people notice that he
was there, which also leads his mother to get arrested and condemned to death.
On Jean Baptiste’s childhood, he was constantly subjected to situations that
evidenced the natural contempt of the world for him because of the disturbance of people
about his lack of smell.
He grew up in Madame Gaillard’s orphanage where he faced various forms of
aggression and learned to keep himself in his own world. “Nothing gave to the world apart
from his droppings, neither a smile, nor a cry, nor a shine on the face, not even his own odor”.
(SÜSKIND. 2001. p. 26). But, although he has no scent of his own, he had an incomparable
sense of smell, which made him capable of identify and classify different kind of smell even
if they were considerably distant.
The owner of the orphanage sold him to the owner of a tannery, where he worked
hard, and after working, he was usually gone for a walk to explore the city. In one of these
nights, he smelled the perfect scent, and followed it, and got shocked to find that the scent of
a beautiful and young woman who didn’t allowed him to get close of her, then he killed her to
get a better smell of her scent, but it ceased after the death. Jean-Baptiste got the idea that his
life would lose the sense if he didn’t know it down to the smallest details, to the last and most
subtle of its branches; not even the most complex recall that he could save would be enough.
He wished he could print this perfume a seal, in the folds of his dark soul, and then study it in
detail and finally comply with the internal structures of this magic formula to guide his
thinking, his life and his smell.
Some time passed while he kept in his search for ways to isolate and to maintain
the scents, and he became an apprentice in Giuseppe Baldini’s perfumery, which was passing
through a period of few customers. In a short period of time, Grenouille stood out as a
perfumer, overcame Baldini, and got a reputation never seen before, and, creating new
perfumes, revitalized Baldini’s perfumery.
 Jean-Baptiste was increasingly interested in keeping the odor permanently, which
led him to seek ways to enable his dream to become reality. In his experiments, he tried to
capture the smell of dead women, until he finally managed to make the perfect scent, which
led people to feel love, plus the feeling of euphoria, liberation and delight, which generated a
total lack of inhibition. He wanted to be loved, and people started to love him, even after they
knew about his crimes, but it didn’t make him happy. He began to feel contempt for the
people, and decided to put an end on it.
He went to the place where he was born, guided by his olfactory memory. Then,
next to his people, he poured the whole magical perfume that was left in the bottle on himself,
and the people, unable to contain themselves exposed to the intoxicating smell that had
animalized their human senses, threw themselves on Grenouille and ate him. After doing this,
people returned to their routines, feeling proud of themselves, they were confident they’ve
just commited an act of love.

My opinion about the book

I think Grenouille is a very interesting character. Misunderstood and not accepted

by the people of his time, he became a loner who, without guidance or models of appropriate
behavior, developed a morbid personality. I like fiction books like this because they
encourage people to think about solutions for the problems of the characters, they believe that
such problems are not part of current society, which is, in part, fortunately true.
This book also made me think about the importance of family and healthy
relationship with people who can teach something good and help to discern good from evil,
which I believe is the reason why Jean had become so obsessed with being loved at any cost.
Even in the book or the movie, it’s possible to notice that Jean speaks very little,
which made me feel sorry for him. I can’t understand how a person can grow up without even
communicate with someone.
I really enjoy books which contains an approach of mental illness and behaviors,
even when they are fiction. I'm always studying something about psychology and philosophy
because I believe that the human mind is one of the most interesting subjects ever invented.

Fátima Maria Ribeiro de Carvalho