El perfume (book) by Patrick Süskind: summary, characters and analysis

Perfume (1984)) is a novel by Patrick Süskind that tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a serial killer with an overdeveloped sense of smell.

Grenouille seeks to materialize, through perfumes, the smells that have remained perfectly engraved in his memory throughout his life.

Book summary

Grenouille grows up in a home for orphaned children until the age of eight under the care of Madame Gaillard. She hands him over to a cruel leather tanner who puts Grenouille in charge of the most dangerous jobs.

One night, during the annual celebration in honor of the king's possession, Grenoille smells perfect. He follows him to rue de Marais where he meets his first victim: an exceptionally beautiful young adolescent with red hair, who finds herself removing the seeds of some yellow plums. Grenouille murders her in order to possess her scent.

The protagonist, aware of his unique talent, decides to work in perfumery and draws the attention of the most prestigious perfumer in Paris, Baldini. Under Baldini, Grenouille learns the chemical processes to distill and materialize perfumes.

After a few years he acquires his freedom and decides to seclude himself in the solitude of a cave. Seven years pass, until one day he has a nightmare and realizes that he himself does not have any odor.

He meets the Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse, a man interested in testing the vital fluid theory that established that objects related to air are healers. For this he decides to take Grenouille as an example, for having lived in a high cave.

Grenouille for his part manages to manufacture a perfume that is an imitation of the human essence, thus he is perceived by others as one more. With this, he decides to leave for Grasse and works in Madame Arnulfi's perfumery workshop, under the command of her lover Druot.

In order to continue his experiments to create human scents, Grenouille begins murdering young virgin women. He kills them with a blow to the head, shaves her hair and wraps them in animal fat so that he can distill her scent. He thus he murders 24 young people.

He reigns in chaos and the murders cease when the bishop decrees that the murderer has been excommunicated. Antoine Richis, a senior officer in Grasse, does not trust that the killings are over. He cleverly deduces that the murderer is some kind of collector and that in this collection his daughter, Laure Richis, the most beautiful woman in Grasse, is the only missing piece.

He decides to suddenly set off with his daughter to a distant inn. But Grenouille, following his scent, finds her and kills her.

He finally creates the desired perfume, with the combination of the scent of all the women he has murdered. He is captured, but before being crucified, he applies the perfume. Everyone who attends is convinced that Grenouille is an angel, and an orgy ensues among the attendees.

Grenouille, disappointed, realizes that he can make others love him but he cannot love. He decides to go to the place where he was born. There he uses the whole bottle of perfume and the people in the square devour it, convinced that they were committing an act motivated only by love.

Characters

These are some of the most important characters in the novel.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

He is the protagonist of the novel. He is presented as a genius who lacks humanity. His genius is in the gift of his sense of smell. It is often compared to an insect that generates disgust. Specifically, with a tick that by his survival instinct lives crouched, waiting immobile the opportunity that some animal arrives to suck his blood and survive from this way.

Curious fact:

This character could have been inspired by two historical figures: The French perfumer Paul Grenouille, who opened a famous perfume house in 1879, and the Spanish serial murderer, Manuel Blanco Romasanta (1809-1863), who murdered women and his children, and extracted his body fat to make soaps.

Madam gaillard

He is the one who takes care of Grenouille until he is eight years old. He has no sense of smell. She is a cold woman who cannot feel any emotions: neither the pleasant nor the unpleasant. She treats all children with equanimity and meets all their basic needs except for affection.

Grimal

Leather tanner. He takes care of Grenouille from the age of eight. He is a ruthless man, capable of killing his apprentice at the slightest sign of disobedience. He considers Grenouille's worth equivalent to that of an animal.

Giuseppe Baldini

Prestigious perfumer. He has a store in the most luxurious neighborhood of the city. He is a conservative man who longs to go back to the old days, to his youth and the safety of the old guilds. He is a lover of recipes and formulas.

Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse

Marquis retired from the court of Versailles to dedicate himself to science. He wanted to create a vital fluid and for this he sought to prove the theory that the earth and terrestrial objects had poison, while the air and objects far from the ground, such as birds and the highest mountains, had healing substances.

Laure richis

She is the most beautiful woman in Grasse. Her skin is pale and her hair is red. According to Grenouille, her scent is even more exciting than that of her first victim.

Antoine richis

Laure's father. He is a high ranking officer in Grasse. He is a noble and cunning man who figures out that the killer is a collector, and that the last piece he needs is his daughter.

Madame Arnulfi

Owner of a perfume factory in Grasse. She is widowed and takes Dominique Druot as her lover. She is a successful and prosperous businesswoman. Even after marrying Druot, she remains in charge of the business and its finances.

Dominique druot

He is the second husband of Madame Arnulfi. He is a proud man and frequently smells of wine and sex. She needs to feel superior as a perfumer to her junior, Grenouille.

Analysis of the book

The novel has an extradiegetic narrator and its story is divided into four parts. The first part corresponds to the years of childhood and adolescence of Grenouille, the second to his stay in the cave and later, with the Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse, the third to the Grasse murders, and the fourth to the death of Grenouille.

In the novel, the descriptions stand out, especially those that correspond to all kinds of smells, which allow the work to be imagined by the reader with cinematographic precision.

The monstrous genius

Grenouille, from the beginning of the novel, is not described as a human being. First of all, unlike the people and objects of the world, he does not have any odor. His babysitter says he just "doesn't smell what humans smell." For this reason people feel disgusted by him, even since he is just a baby. He produces the same sensation as an insect, a spider, and is often associated with a tick.

His genius, on the other hand, cannot be interpreted in the conventional sense: it is difficult for Grenouille to understand the concepts. abstract, his teachers think he is retarded, and in reality he does not understand such simple things as relating or talking like his similar.

The genius of him is in his highly developed sense of smell and above all, the inner world that this has allowed him to recreate. Through smell he can better perceive the world in which he lives: from a young age he could predict who would visit, if there would be a storm, where the lost objects are.

He also remembers all the smells that he has perceived throughout his life, and when he remembers them it is as if he could smell them again. He can divide all the components of a scent and combine them to his liking, creating scents that do not exist in the world.

The aroma and the soul

Perfume develops around the relationship between smell and spirit. From the beginning Father Terrier raises the primitive theory that by means of the smell of blood the cavemen could recognize if he was a friend or an enemy and this would allow them survive.

Later it is described how Grenouille senses Grimmal with his nose, and with this he knows what to expect: "this man would be able to beat him to death at the slightest insubordination." A theory is then presented that establishes that the aroma is a sign of the character's moral character, and therefore, of the soul. In contrast, the murdered women have an angelic character, generate love and smell of beauty.

But the spirit captured by Grenouille not only corresponds to that of individuals, but also to the spirit of specific places. Especially the one in the square where he was born:

(...) all the activity was down to the smallest detail present in the air that he had left behind. Grenouille saw the entire market with his nose, if you can put it that way. And he smelled it more accurately than many saw it, since he perceived it inside and therefore more intensely: as the essence, the spirit of something past that is not disturbed by the habitual attributes of the present, such as noise, hubbub, the disgusting mens.

In this sense, the power of creating a perfume consists precisely in its ability to create scents that are associated with the soul and emotions: love, childhood, the first date, as well as in their ability to refer to memories and recreate them.

Pastiche and canivalism

Critics have highlighted the use of pastiche for the creation of this novel. The pastiche consists of a composition based on previous works. You can take fragments, specific elements or characteristics of other works and combine them, in a way that gives the impression of being an independent creation.

It is a subject related to literary intertextuality that deals with the importance of dialogue between the various works of the literary universe to enrich the field, and with plagiarism, which calls into question the originality and authorship of the work as a everything.

Judith Ryan, has pointed out about the pastiche technique in Perfume:

Against both of those who argue that El perfume it's a masterpiece original -if untraditional- and those who see it as a derivative work that falsely attracts those who do not discriminate, this work places the novel within the framework of a postmodernist tendency towards a multiple. The intertextual allusions in Perfume are read as a complex critique of the symbolist and romantic aesthetic traditions (...).

The pastiche, in its spirit of appropriation and reworking based on other works, is related to cannibalism, and refers to the voracity of the protagonist, Grenouille, who does not it has its own scent, but it needs to capture and appropriate all kinds of smells, taking itself the properties of the objects it smells, be they beautiful maidens or even wood:

He breathed in this smell, he drowned in it, he impregnated himself with it to the last pore, he turned into wood, into a doll of wood, in a Pinocchio, (...), he slid down the logs and staggered away, as if he had the legs of a wood.

Perfume becomes part of the dialogue of the set of works that work on reworking, such as collage or palimpsest, and questions what can be considered as original and what value originality has in the Literature.

Movie Perfume (2006)

The play was made into a movie with the title Perfume: The Story of a murderer, (2006) by director Tom Tykwer, recognized for also being the director of the classic Run Lola run (1998). It was carried out by the English actor Ben Whishaw, and also the renowned actor Dustin Hoffman participated in the role of Antoine Richis. You can watch the trailer below.

Miniseries Perfume (2018)

Süskind's novel was used as inspiration to create the German miniseries Perfume, which can be seen on Netflix. It is about the investigation of the murders of a group of young people, and their connection with some students from medicine, who, like Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, seek to create a perfume that allows the manipulation of others. You can watch the trailer below.

About Patrick Süskind

He was born in Germany (1949) in Ambach, Bavaria. He is a writer and screenwriter. He studied Modern and Medieval History at the University of Munich and in France at Aix-en-Provence, although he never graduated. Perfume He launched him to fame after becoming a best seller.

He is also well known for his theatrical monologue The double bass. It became the longest running play, performed more than 500 times a year. Today it is still represented nationally and internationally.

His family has an aristocratic origin. He stands out for his privacy. He never gives interviews or allows photographs to be taken. He was the winner of the script award from the German Department of Culture. He has had the luxury of rejecting other German awards, such as the FAZ-Literaturpreis, Tukan-Preis [de] Y Gutenbergpreis.

He lives in seclusion between Munich, on Lake Starnberg, and the small town of Montolieu, France.

Other works by Patrick Süskind

• The double bass
• Perfume
• Dove
• The story of Mr. Sommer
• Three stories and a consideration
• A combat and other stories
• About love and death