The Sweet Smell of Perfume

Perfume

By Patrick Suskind

Knopf; 225 pp.; $16.95

IT SEEMS THAT every other day another European fashion becomes the newest American trend. From miniskirts to mohawks, oversized overcoats to lacy lingerie, and punk music to Paris perfumes, American consumers eagerly anticipate the arrival of chic treats from across the Atlantic.

But this fall, the fragrance that's causing the greatest sensation in Europe won't be sold in Bloomingdales but in book stores. German writer Patrick Suskind's international best seller Perfume has been translated into English and already has a trail of American readers avidly tracking its scent.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, is a bold and bizarre exploration of sensual obsession. Set in 18th-century France, Perfume chronicles the rise of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the world's greatest perfumer, gifted with the world's most incredible sense of smell.

Grenouille doesn't just detect scents--he digests them, dissects them, and then preserves the essence of their individual components in the redolent storehouse of his mind. And whether smells are fresh and sweet or spoiled and foul, Grenouille devours them all with equal delight.

Luckily for readers, Suskind is as skillful at describing scents as his protagonist is at detecting them, allowing us to share the unique experience of Grenouille's sensual explorations, if not his unbiased reception of both pleasant and putrid smells. Eighteenth-century France is a sensual playground for Grenouille, as Suskind writes:

The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.

FORTUNATELY for the squeamish reader, France is also the perfume capital of the world, and as Grenouille becomes an apprentice at a renonwned parfumerie, we are introduced to the more palattable scents of orange blossom, jasmine, clove, and attar of roses.

But effortlessly concocting the most popular fragrances in Paris is mere child's play for Grenouille, whose ultimate goal is to reproduce that "sweaty-oily, sour-cheesy, quite richly repulsive" odor that is human scent. Although Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is the greatest "smeller" in all the world, he has no body smell of his own.

Grenouille sets out to create a human scent that is so uniquely seductive, enrapturing, and irresistible that it will enable him to rule the world. Included on Grenouille's unusual list of ingredients for this powerful concoction are young virgins, and readers who had trouble stomaching Suskind's disgustingly detailed descriptions of Paris streets will undoubtedly have some difficulty getting through "The Story of a Murderer" conclusion of Perfume.

As Grenouille's crusade for sensual domination of the world leads him to descend into the innermost depths of evil Suskind's work grows more and more bizarre, losing some of its attraction as an entertainment novel, yet gaining appeal as a strangely hypnotic excercise in the pains and pleasures of sensual extremes.

Perfume is no routine piece of parlor fiction. Rather, it is an unusually intriguing sensual exploration of human desire and the destructive conseqences of searching for power and love. If nothing else, Perfume is a testimony to the power of the written word. Suskind possesses a brutally honest, sadistically sensitive style that cannot but enthrall and challenge the imagination.