Paper Cuts: Perfume, the Story of a Murderer (Patreon)

On a stinking street in Paris in the last century of Bourbon reign, a nameless woman delivers her fifth child into a pail of rotten refuse. Shortly after this she is arrested for her previous infanticides and put to death, leaving the child in care of the city’s dubious charitable institutions. Alas, the minute crumbs of kindness given to the infant Jean Baptiste Grenouille are too little and too late, the world having stamped its essential cruelty and hostility on him with indelible firmness in the first seconds of his conscious life. The brief and monstrous life which unfolds from this single small act of indifference is a delirious fantasy of rejection, a twisting of childhood trauma into supernatural phenomena not so different from the stories that have been the stock in trade of superhero comics for over half a century. Suskind, however, locates the source of such trauma in infancy rather than adolescence, rendering his story strangely bicameral in that Grenouille is never really aware of the traumatic events that drive him, reacting instead to the shadows they cast in his developing mind. He is a slave to these memories in the same way he perceives the humans around him as slaves to scent, an act of violent projection he clings to in order to redirect society’s rejection of him back at itself.

Suskind’s prose is both concise and overflowing with detail, absorbed as it is in rendering comprehensible the sense human beings have least intellectualized. How do you evoke smell in a reader’s mind? How do you conjure its slight variations, its unique and highly individual emotional associations, its roots in localized idiom and subtle social connotation? Suskind sets about the task as systematically as Grenouille sets to his quest to master scent itself, building our understanding not just of scent itself but of his particular portrayal of it from the ground up as Grenouille matures into his adolescence and early adulthood. From his early realizations about human odor and the scents of inert substances to his tutelage in the arts of tanning, perfumery, and enfleurage, the capturing of scent in blocks of fat which retain solidity at room temperature. We learn how scent moves through air, how bodies emit and retain it, how it influences the mind and memory, until thinking in terms of scent becomes as natural to us as it is to Grenouille.

And what of the apprentice perfumer’s goal, desire, and reason for being? His long sojourn as a hermit in an isolated mountain cave may be preoccupied with stagnant fantasies of sex, violence, and degradation, but it’s inclusion he craves. He wants to be desired the way a regressive and violent society desires its most exquisite blooms: beautiful girls on the cusp of pubescence. Yet as he kills these girls and obtains their scents in increasingly complex ways, his loathing for humanity only grows. Cloaked in perfume derived from his victims he is adored, even worshiped, but the blatant manufacture of these feelings of goodwill drives him deeper into insanity. His power to influence a system from which he was born excluded is in constant conflict with that foundational trauma, pushing him deeper into it the more desperately he grasps for relief. In the end even his murderers are deceived, drawn to cannibalize him at the place of his birth by a powerful application of his perfumes. They agree sheepishly as they pick him from their teeth that it could only have been done out of love, tying off the hateful knot of Grenouille’s life with the crushingly simple declaration that acceptance and rejection are two sides of the same meaningless coin.