In its purity and its goodness, the smell is like nothing Grenouille has ever come across and he wishes to possess it. He follows an enchanting smell only to find that it belongs to a young nubile girl. It is whilst working for Baldini that Grenouille commits his first murder, spontaneously and without any particular malice.
The vain Baldini uses him to copy the successful scents produced by others and to create remarkable new fragrances which restore Baldini’s fame and fortune. An unscrupulous perfumer in the city, whose best days are behind him, discovers the boy’s skills and buys him from the tanner, obviously without revealing Grenouille’s gifts. He also begins to learn that he has an exceptional sense of smell – it’s almost painterly in its precision. Once old enough he is apprenticed to a tanner and lives a brutal existence. As he goes through life, we learn that those who come into contact with him invariably meet a tragic end. The sense of his insatiable appetite and how he sucks the life out of those around him is established. So much so that the wet-nurse hired to take care of him, returns him as he is drinking too much of her milk, making it impossible for her to take on any other infants and therefore make a living.
He is left to the mercy of the church, but proves a demanding and difficult baby, who, despite his unpromising start, appears to enjoy rude health. When he is discovered alive, his mother is tried for infanticide and executed. She pauses her work briefly in order to give birth to him but then, believing or perhaps wishing him to be yet another of the many stillbirths she is said to have had, she leaves him for dead amongst the discarded fish guts. The book begins in mid-eighteenth century Paris when the central character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born beneath a fish stall, to an indigent mother.
None of this surprises me this book has surely to be the product of a very unusual mind. Despite this, its author published only a handful of other works ( Perfume was his second book) and virtually retired from literary life in the mid-1990s and now, in his seventies, lives as a recluse between Germany and France, shunning all publicity. It won numerous prizes, remained on the bestseller lists in Germany for many years and was universally acclaimed. It has sold over twenty million copies worldwide and been translated into 49 different languages. It was first published in the original German in 1985, and published in English the following year. This book is without doubt one of the most extraordinary novels of the late twentieth century.
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