The Nose Knows

By Paul Gray

A lot of head scratching followed the international success of The Name of the Rose during the early 1980s. People whose business it is to foresee what books the public will buy were stumped; who would have predicted blockbusterdom for an abstruse murder mystery set in a 14th century monastery and written by an Italian professor of semiotics? Experts could console themselves with the thought that Umberto Eco's worldwide triumph was a once-in-a-lifetime aberration. Now, even that cold comfort seems endangered. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is about to hit the English-speaking world after a dazzling debut in Europe. The original German-language edition of this novel sold more than 400,000 copies; translations into French, Spanish and Dutch also became best sellers, and the book will ultimately appear in more than 30 languages. Someday, centuries hence, this phenomenon may seem easily explicable. Of course: How could such a book fail? After all, it is about a physically repulsive 18th century Frenchman with no discernible personality, no body odor and the keenest sense of smell the world has ever seen.

From this unappealing premise Author Patrick Sueskind, 37, spins a tale as energetic and engaging as it is improbable. Immediately after giving birth, an unwed mother dumps her unwanted infant into a pile of fish offal, amid the "fiendish stench" of the nearby Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris. Unfortunately, the baby's screams attract the attention of the police. They arrest the mother and hand her progeny over to church authorities, who baptize him Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. The tyke's wet nurses keep quitting. He drinks too greedily, they complain, and there is something else truly spooky about him. Explains one woman: "He doesn't smell at all."

Jean-Baptiste grows up unloved and unlovely but a genius of a peculiar sort. He can catalog the world around him by scents: "He had gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world." This talent has at least one major flaw: "The creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself."

What is a novelist to do with an antihero who has no need of external reality except for an occasional sniff? Sueskind invents several short-lived missions for Jean-Baptiste. The first, to become the "greatest perfumer of all time," is child's play. Wheedling an apprenticeship with the renowned but fading establishment of Giuseppe Baldini, Grenouille easily makes his master the toast of Paris and the rest of the civilized world. Next, he spends seven years on an isolated mountain, safe from the smells of humanity and lolling in olfactory memories. Finally, he embarks on a quest to conquer the world by creating an irresistible aroma for himself, to become the "world's most fragrant human being." This task involves the systematic killing of beautiful young virgins.

Despite the plot's implausibilities, Sueskind's fable proves effective in several ways. Born half a century before the French Revolution, Grenouille is a foretaste of modern man as monstrous solipsist or, as a contemporary describes him, an "entirely new specimen of the race." The novel's emphasis on the sense of smell is disquieting, given the deodorizing proclivities of modern life: "The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it." And those readers who feel they are wasting their time with novels unless they are picking up facts will welcome Sueskind's encyclopedic overview of the methods of making perfume. Like the best scents, there is something fundamentally formulaic about this novel, but its effects will linger long after it has been stoppered. --By Paul Gray Best Sellers

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