Perfume

Jean Baptiste Grenouille is born in the stench of an eighteenth century Paris fish market with the most extraordinary sense of smell anyone around him has ever encountered, and, in a detail the novel treats as just as remarkable, with no scent of his own at all. Passed between an orphanage, a tannery, and eventually an apprenticeship with the fading perfumer Giuseppe Baldini, whose failing business Grenouille quietly revives with formulas built entirely from his nose, he becomes obsessed with capturing and preserving the perfect human scent after killing a young girl almost by accident and finding her smell unbearably beautiful. That obsession carries him to Grasse, the center of the French perfume trade, where he murders twenty four young women, extracting and preserving their scent through a laborious process called enfleurage, working steadily toward a final, twenty fifth killing: Laure Richis, whose scent alone he believes will complete the greatest perfume ever made. He kills her, is caught, and is condemned to a public execution, but the perfume he has made from his victims is so overwhelming that the assembled crowd, meant to watch him die, instead falls into a spontaneous, uncontrollable orgy of adoration, and Grenouille walks free while another man is wrongly blamed for the murders. Disgusted rather than satisfied by a love he knows is manufactured and false, Grenouille returns to the Paris market where he was born, pours the entire remaining bottle of perfume over himself, and is torn apart and eaten by the crowd it draws, a final scene the novel plays with the same flat, exact horror as everything that came before it.

Süskind writes with an unusually sustained focus on smell as the novel's only real sense, describing odors with a precision most fiction reserves for sight, and the book reads quickly for something this strange and grim, propelled by Grenouille's total lack of an interior moral life rather than by any suspense about what he might do next.