Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Sun, April 1, 2007 at 08:11PM 
Perfume
Written by Patrick Suskind
Read by Sean Barrett
Published by Penguin Audio (unabridged 8hrs 30mins)
Piece: £16.98 CD
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was belched into the stench of 18th-century Paris. Into an olfactory assault; “The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings..”
This book is great for audio, being full of toe curling descriptions of every kind of smell. It is at the heart of the whole novel. Suskind sets the tone with his vivid olfactory descriptions of the place where Grenouille was born.
Sean Barrett reads with excellent clarity and an aloofness that captures Grenouille’s abominable character. Grenouille is doesn’t have a smell; a fact that makes him suspicious and repulsive to his fellow Parisians. What he does have is the ability to smell a man a mile up the road. This power is echoed in the colourful language and descriptions of smell.
Through shear cunning Grenouille wheedles himself an apprenticeship to a master perfumer, Baldini. Grenouille wants to learn how to manipulate scent, making oils and eau de perfume; anything he can to extract the scent of the most beautiful thing he has ever smelled. A young girl.
The town borders on hysteria when murdered young girls are found naked, with their hair shorn off. The search is on for a serial killer, but no one can pin point any defining description of a man seen at the time of each killing. In the meantime, Grenouille is creating the best perfumes in Paris.
Of course he is caught. And it is when he is reaping his final conquest. The scent of the final girl is the one that will make the finest scent known to man. But, something incredulous happens when he is taken to the gallows; and we realise Grenouille succeeded in his quest. With just one droplet of the scent, the onlookers, including the families of the murdered girls, turn on each other in a frenzied orgy. (Watch out if you’re at traffic lights at this point…Suskind is great with imagery!)
After this point, I wanted Grenouille to get into something just as pacey and stomach churning. But he didn’t. He spends the next few years in a cave, eating frogs and bugs. (Also watch out here, as pulling disgusted faces at traffic likes makes you look weird.)
He leaves the cave to become a successful guinea pig and showpiece for a society quack. However, the end of Grenouille is the sort of thing that’ll bring you out in cold sweats at night if you’ve a weak stomach. I loved every minute!
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