Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

“He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”

There are good books, bad books, interesting books and boring books. But there is also another category that’s unique books, it may be bad or good.  This books is chilling tale of murder, something similar to ”The silence of the lambs”. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is  the great German classic of the 1980s. Few years back when the movie adaption of this novel was on TV I couldn’t watch it thinking it is again another boring story. But now after reading the book I really want to watch the movie.

This book is about Jean Baptiste Grenouille, a orphan born with no scent. No one can smell him as his body does not have any kind of scent. But he is gifted, he can smell anything from far places and store it in his memory and produce it later and feel it for himself. He has the capacity to differentiate and name the scents in one particular scent. But people think he is evil or some kind of bad curse becuase he doesn’t smell,which is the basic thing about humans. His childhood as a tanner, perfumer allows him to learn so many things but he wants to do more. He first murders a red head girl, attracted by her smell. He can remember and re smell it forever but he can’t possess the smell. For that he finds out easy way of storing their smell. From there his murderous journey starts…..

This book is totally unique from the beginning. There is no reason why Grenouille was born without any scent, was he a part of evil? But best part of this book is you get into  Grenouille’s characters and you start imaginary smelling whatever mentioned in the book. Like you can smell river, sweat, sea, air, even you can imagine smelling some perfume from your own imagination. It is a wonderful but cold blooded murder tale of a non scented person in search of scent.