“He was born scentless and senseless, he was born a scentless apprentice.”

Every so often there comes a work of literature whose deep themes express the darkness of human thoughts and beg the mind to inquire into the sheer hysteria of the human psyche. Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Süskind, is one such book. 

The story of Perfume forces the reader to be immersed into a mind of pure hatred. It is a story centered around a man named Grenouille who is possessed with an otherworldly, perhaps even magical, sense of smell. 

The striking language of the story primarily tells the tale by describing scents. In this way, we see the world through the olfactory sense of our cruel protagonist. Descriptions of eighteenth-century Paris with its rotting fish stalls, piles of waste, unwashed masses and polluted air all help to make the disgusting reality of the city a clear picture in the reader’s mind. Hate is all Grenouille has known, for his own mother tried to slaughter him the moment he was born. When he was a baby, a wet nurse felt fear instead of love for him. Her woes are due to the fact that the child lacks a scent, something she finds unnatural. For while Grenouille can smell better than any other human, his own body gives off no scent. As Grenouille grows older, other orphanage children attempt to smother him, for they too sense that something is wrong. Grenouille is afflicted with diseases common in the filthy city multiple times throughout his life. And yet, despite his sicknesses, he doesn’t perish. It’s as if he cannot be destroyed. 

One evening, as Grenouille decides to inhabit the nightly streets of Paris, he smells something that fills him with uncontrollable obsession. It is a scent he describes as “inconceivable, indescribable, one that could not be categorized in any way.” It is a scent so pure and divine that Grenouille desires to possess it fully and use it for his purposes, twisting something good into an instrument of destruction. It is the scent of innocence and beauty, the scent of a young virgin girl. With sick intentions he strangles the girl, and wholly smells her dead body with delusional passion. In his mind, “a hundred thousand odors seemed worthless in the presence of this scent. This one scent was the high principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty.” Destroying this girl leads Grenouille to believe that he has found the true meaning and purpose of his life.  He now wishes for “nothing less than to revolutionize the odoriferous world.” He has the sudden, illogical, insatiable desire to become the greatest perfumer the world has ever known, so that he, the crazed madman may steal for himself the smell that he finds most beautiful, the scent of young virgins.  

Grenouille refrains from unleashing his evil during his days as an apprentice perfumer, choosing instead to control his urges. He knows that before he distills the scent of other young maidens he must first learn how to best preserve and harness their scents, or in Grenouille’s eyes, what he calls their “essences.” Only then can he experience an ecstasy that is longer lasting than his briefly sensual experience with his first victim. 

Baldini, the perfumer, takes Grenouille as his apprentice. He is entranced by Grenouille’s talents in perfume making. This causes him to ignore Grenouille’s concealed evil and emotionless nature in favor of the chance of worldly fame and riches he shall receive from the incredible perfumes his apprentice creates. Baldini, a deeply religious man, abandons his religious obligations in favor of becoming a successful perfumer. In this way, he ignores the teachings of God in pursuit of greedy desires, leading to his ruin. Soon after Grenouille leaves Baldini to forge his own path, as a consequence of his sins, Baldini’s shop falls into the river, killing him and his wife, his corpse floating down the Seine. In Perfume, God implicitly exists, and the desire of Baldini for profit over the care of his own soul leads to his sudden death.  

Once Grenouille leaves the crowded city of Paris, he begins to realize just how much he despises humanity. He cringes at the scent of humans, and heads further and further away from their presence. He finds solace in a cave and stays there for seven years, his thoughts becoming increasingly narcissistic in nature. In deep delusion he begins to envision himself as a God, worshiped and desired by all around him. 

It is not until his time in the cave that Grenouille finally becomes aware of his disturbing lack of scent. Soon after this discovery, he leaves the cave and makes his way to another town, his mind focused on the creation of exquisite scents through the possession and corruption of the beautiful. Grenouille becomes increasingly cunning, and uses his evil knowledge to create a perfume that smells human, allowing him to disguise his uncanny lack of smell. In doing this he deceives the townspeople into thinking that there is nothing unusual, nothing wrong with cold-blooded Grenouille. Now that he is free from local suspicion, he begins to practice possessing scents by killing animals and pressing their lifeless bodies into cloth. In this way, the scents will become even stronger than normal, the idea filling Grenouille with joy. 

All this is mere preparation for a scent Grenouille chances across that he comes to desire more than anything. It is the scent of a virgin girl named Laure. Her scent is miraculously even more glorious than that of his first victim. Laure possesses ethereal beauty, with “a scent so terrifyingly celestial that once it had unfolded its total glory, it would unleash a perfume such as the world had never smelled before.” The townspeople all sense something beautifully seraphic about Laure, but only Grenouille knows that the true reason why people will become “helpless before the magic of this girl” is her scent. The nefarious Grenouille realizes that, should he wish to preserve Laure most efficiently, he must wait until she blossoms into her sensual fullness so that he may “possess the scent of this girl behind the wall” and “make her scent his own.” 

Grenouille cares only for his own self-destructive desires, and for the control and domination of all humans he observes. He strikes terror amongst the townspeople as he kills twenty-four young girls, all virgins, their essences put into a single perfume. With this perfume, he hopes to add the luscious scent of Laure as his crowning achievement, in his lustful passion to create the perfect scent. 

These murders remain unsolved, and Grenouille remains free of suspicion, for the simple townspeople are easily deceived by his clever masking of evil. Grenouille appears normal to outsiders, and his strange lack of scent is masked by the human scented perfume he applies to his body. The perpetrator has yet to be caught, much less seen. Laure’s father, Antoine, remains fearful for his daughter, for he knows that she is achingly beautiful and virginally pure, the perfect victim for the unknown murderer.

Antoine attempts to marry Laure to another man so that she may be protected from this evil. En route to the wedding, Antoine and Laure stay at an inn. The only other person there is a small man, who appears harmless to Antoine. Sadly, unbeknownst to him, the man is Grenouille, who has tracked down Laure’s scent. Late at night, while Antoine is deep in peaceful slumber, Grenouille murders Laure and spends hours “drinking up her scent, her glorious scent, his scent.” When he is satisfied, he flees and adds her essence to his perfume of incomprehensible beauty. 

The discovery of Laure’s dead body sends the local people into complete shock, their minds unable to comprehend an act of such shocking evil. Most disturbed of all is Laure’s father, angered by this sordid crime. He is able to catch a glimpse of Grenouille as he runs off, and from his eyewitness, the townspeople are able to correctly identify Grenouille as the murderer. He is set to soon be executed.

Yet clever Grenouille deceives the entire community, twisting their intense hatred of him into an impassioned love. When he applies a small amount of his perfected perfume, the people fall madly in love with him, thoroughly deceived into thinking something evil is good. The people adore Grenouille and believe that they have falsely accused a man of great innocence. Antoine ends up loving him most of all, begging Grenouille to forgive him and asking for him to become his most beloved and precious son. 

Despite their love, Grenouille’s thoughts remain fixated on darkness. He sneaks away from the town once more, desiring to die in Paris. He finds existence suffocating, whether among human beings or in an unlivable cave. His fiendish abilities, his gift of creating scents of controlling beauty, the source of which humans cannot understand, is powerful enough to “enslave the whole world.” If Grenouille truly desired, he could “write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new Messiah.” The intoxicating perfume that he possesses is “the invincible power to command the love of mankind.” However, Grenouille is so filled with hate that he desires to end his life, committing suicide in a horrific manner. He applies perfume to his body, and a group of people surrounding him are so obsessed with its cherubic smell that they eat him alive, aiming to possess this scent out of a deceived and misplaced concept of love. So ends the grotesque tale of Grenouille, the one who harnessed the power to control men’s minds through scent. 

To the reader, perhaps Grenouille’s evil seems undefinable, bizarre, and unlike that of other murderers because of his unique gift. For smell is the sense most commonly associated with memories—yet it is a sense more alien and subliminal than hearing or sight. It seems as though we humans do not possess the same capacity to interpret scents as we do images or sounds. Scents often unconsciously remind us of past emotions, a feeling perhaps similar to a dream with a message you swear you’ve heard before. In some ways, Perfume feels indescribable, the sort of work in which it seems there’s more to the story, but perhaps we are unprepared to comprehend its full meaning. It is a work in which the ugliness of human nature is revealed, as humans are portrayed as being altogether easily deceived, more often given to base desires instead of goodness and rationality. 

The indescribable effect Perfume brings the reader is exemplified by the effect it had on songwriter Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist of famed 90’s band Nirvana. In one of his last interviews before his suicide, Kurt claimed to have “read Perfume by Patrick Süskind about ten times in my life. I can’t stop reading it, it’s like something that’s stationary in my pocket all the time, it just doesn’t leave me and every time I’m bored… I read it over and over again…it just affects me, makes me wanna cut my nose off.” So affected was Kurt by this book that he also co-wrote a song based on the novel, entitled “Scentless Apprentice,” his impassioned screams giving the track an angry and aggressive sound. 

Perhaps one of the most intriguing things about Perfume is its reclusive author. Patrick  Süskind’s work, originally published in Germany in 1985, became a bestseller with upwards of 20 million copies sold. He has won multiple awards for his writings, and yet he declines to receive them. He has only given a total of four interviews throughout his entire career, most during the 1980’s when Perfume was first published. Very few pictures of  Süskind exist online. And yet, perhaps the author’s mysterious nature only adds to the power of this impassioned novel.  By having a character so evil that he is comparable to Satan, and by revealing the ease at which he deceives others, he makes the reader disturbingly aware of the reality that there are those that seek to destroy goodness. Good people must do all they can to protect and preserve the innocent, while avoiding the temptingly easy opportunity to be deceived into darkness themselves. 

Sophia Mandt is a freshman studying the liberal arts.