Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

So, I finally finished the book I've been reading for the last few weeks. I had kept it in my purse and was spacing it out, reading it whenever I was out of the house and waiting for something.

I had been hearing about how wonderful this book was for years, but never bothered to get a copy. Then I was at a library sale in Portsmouth (I live for library sales) and they had a shelf of free paperbacks by the cashier. So while they were ringing up my seven royal related books, I looked over the shelf and saw a small paperback copy of Perfume. It was perfect; small enough to fit in my purse, which is more than I can say for most of my personal library.

So, I started reading it. The brilliance of this book is in the details. I'd have to say it actually took me along time to really "get into" the plot. I had to force myself to read the first 100 pages or so, and I kept telling myself "this gets really good, you have to keep going" as I went along. And it does get really good.

Perfume is a historical fiction/crime/fantasy novel. I really don't know how to describe it. Without giving too much away, it's about a rather disturbed young man in eighteenth-century France who has an incredibly strong sense of smell, but is haunted by his own total lack of scent. The main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is someone you shouldn't be able to sympathize with, but like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, you can't help it. It's all in the writing. Beyond the plot, characters, and twists, this book is really about a time and place.

More so than any other historical fiction novel I've ever read, this book takes you there. It describes every scent with such strong detail that you can't help but smell it yourself. Every thing that a character experiences is described in enough details for you to feel like you're experiencing it. But this is not a realistic novel; far from it. I would consider Perfume borderline fantasy. On some level the narrator (though not a character; the story is told in third-person) is meant to be unreliable. But it doesn't matter. It all is described so well and makes so much sense, you can't help but thinking the world is really dominated by scents as it is in this novel.

This book gets recommended a lot. I've seen it recommended on about four different sites I frequent. But please read it. And push yourself through where it drags on a bit, and you'll be very glad you did.