About this title: A story about an 18th-century foundling, Jean Baptiste Grenouille - a monster, a murderer - obsessed with smell. To create the perfect perfume he must gather the scent from a number of beautiful girls, and to gather this scent he must first kill them.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780671749606ISBN:0671749609
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. pages show yellowing due to age-otherwise in good condition. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 310 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780671749606ISBN:0671749609
Description: Acceptable. WRITING INSIDE FRONT COVER. MAY HAVE COVER WEAR, SPINE CREASES, HIGHLIGHTING, UNDERLINING & PAGES YELLOWED FROM AGE. FASTER SERVICE FROM US! ! ! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"Cold and inhuman look on humanity. Cynical and dark, but humorous at times injecting a Voltaire like quality. Beautifully described and detailed, without bogging down. Sharp and to the point at all times while still exuding a rococo quality. It never wastes time despite the extreme amounts of perfectly detailed flourishes. The text always feels like it accelerates the plot."
"I want my last 2 weeks back. I dove into this book expecting a hell of a lot more than I dragged out of it. From the very beginning I did not like the author's writing style and should have known then that this book just wouldn't be for me.
This book is set in the mid-1700's France and centers around a horrid man who has no redeeming qualities other than the fact that he has likely the most perfect sense of smell in the history of mankind. But he uses this skill for selfish and evil purposes and we get to come along for the story of his life - if you could call it that.
The premise of the story seemed interesting enough, and of course the title tells us that there is going to be murder so that always makes for interesting reading. But I just found it to be extremely boring and tiresome.
The author obviously did his research relating to all things perfume - the methods involved in it's creation - both chemically and artistically - and the importance of it's purpose in that point in history. But he goes overboard with list after exhaustive list of ingredients or steps within a process or varieties to be found. He can't help but describe every minute detail, not just of perfume, but of the landscape or the people. I love descriptive writing - I truly do - but I do also like to have an exciting plot to keep me involved. By the time he finished describing a scene I forgot why we were there.
This book lulled me to sleep and caused me to welcome distractions rather than turning the page so it took me a lot longer than a book of this length normally would. I know that it is loved by many and was recommended to me by several whose opinions I value. But this one just didn't cut it. Even when the action picked up in the last 50 pages or so, it became extremely bizarre and made me wonder what the heck the point was exactly."
"Let me begin by telling you that this book is hilarious, and I am mildly obsessed with it. I loved it. Grenouille is my new favorite literary character. I've even started doing little impersonations of him when I'm feeling particularly annoying, which I think is going over pretty well around my house. He lurks in the shadows, is mildly hunchbacked, and sniffs the air like a total freak.
Anyway, as you may know, Perfume is the story of Grenouille, a man born with the ability to smell every little thing in the world, but who has no scent of his own. His nose is his compass; he relies on it more than most rely on their eyes or ears. He lives to smell, to identify each layer of fragrance in everything from a sweaty Paris street to a brass doorknob. He can deconstruct even the most complex aromas. His early days are spent creating an olfactory map of the world, a vast catalogue of odors which serves as his memory bank and through which he can leaf and re-experience, or invent new experiences by combining, in his mind, fragrances that have never before been layered with one another. While one might expect a nose like his to be revolted by foul odors, he is actually well suited to dealing with them, and as such is able to endure the most unappealing tasks without much thought. Inevitably, he becomes horrified by his own lack of odor and sets out with an enhanced drive to create the ultimate perfume, the source for which he has managed to sniff out and isolate using that incredible nose of his. Unfortunately, murder is a necessary side effect of capturing this scent, and since this smell becomes what he lives for, he does whatever he must to obtain it. This is a man on a mission, and he is surprisingly determined, crafty, and always successful, without coming off as malicious in any way.
Every page of this book is funny. There is an almost Dickensian charm about the peripheral characters, whose quirks help save this book from ever becoming too morbid. Suskind does not miss an opportunity to remind us that Grenouille is disgusting to behold. When he is a creepy baby nobody wants anything to do with him. He goes unnoticed for most of his adulthood and is only barely tolerated when it is in someone's financial interest to do so. The author also has this cutely subtle way of letting us know that Greanouille is a bit of a walking curse on people who become involved with him. Suskind clearly delights in describing, in uncomfortable detail, things like oozing, seeping pustules. The ending is utterly fantastic. It is a totally unabashed celebration of freakishness."
"Creepy, amazing, beautifully written, with another dose of creepy.
Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is born into absolute poverty, but is gifted with an extraordinary sense of smell. The book describes his life, beginning with his birth in a fish market (his mother gives birth to him under her fish stall and then leaves him there) to his totally bizarre death. In between, Grenouille becomes obsessed with preserving scents - human scents in particular, because Grenouille does not have a scent. He is especially obsessed with preserving the scents of beautiful young girls, and discovers that the best way to do this is to kill them, then wrap their bodies in oil-soaked cloths and then distill the oils to get the essential oils of each girl's scent. That's where the creepy part comes in. Grenouille is methodical and completely emotionless when it comes to killing - he barely even looks at his victims, and focuses only on their smell. The girls themselves never get to be more than victims - Laure, the girl whose scent Grenouille is most obsessed with obtaining, is probably only given a name so we can distinguish her from the twenty-five other girls Grenouille kills, and she never gets so much as a single word of dialogue. The reader never gets to learn anything about her personality or if she can even walk unassisted - she and the other girls in the story exist only as scents and pretty faces, and this makes it really hard to feel anything when Grenouille kills them. I know the author did this on purpose, and I'm still trying to decide if I liked it or not.
That being said, I still really liked this story. It's a horror story from beginning to end, and a good one at that. Read it for that nice "I-feel-like-less-of-a-human-being-for-enjoying this" feeling."
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