Read it in: three days (it’s holidays again)

I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while.  I know I say this about a lot of books, but this was especially true for this one.  The concept never really appealed to me (a book about perfumes and smell… what on earth? I thought) but in high school English class we once read an excerpt from the first couple of pages which described in incredible detail the streets of Paris during the late 1700s.  It went something like this:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.  The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots.  The stench of sulphur 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…  The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the King himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the Queen like an old goat, summer and winter.  For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life, that was not accompanied by stench.’ (pg 3-4)

I do love a bit of description.  I love it a lot.  And I did love this book quite a bit.  The only thing that irritated me slightly was the cover.  Actually, this irritated me a lot.  The cover I’ve chosen to put up the top here is not the cover of the book that I read.  Rather, this one right here is.  Look at it.  It is a romance novel cover.  The person who designed this cover was a romance cover designer who couldn’t think of anything else to put on a book about fragrance and perfume.  Try some perfume bottles next time or, like the cover above, somebody’s nose.  Yes, the book includes some very important red-headed girls, however in no part of the book are they lying around under bedsheets looking like back-alley whores.  In fact, strange as it may see with a cover like this, this book is not about sex.  For most of this book, there is no sex, and when there is sex the main character is not involved… as such.  But, for reasons unknown to me, I had to brave public transport for three days reading a book that looked like this and trying not to be judged by people.  Oh the shame!

Alright, now that I’ve got that off my chest, I may as well talk about what is beyond the cover.  You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, after all, though I certainly would have if I was riding public transport with myself during this time.  Okay, that’s enough now.  This book is about a young man, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who has this superhuman sense of smell, meaning that he can pick up the scents of things that we wouldn’t usually consider having a scent.  Like rocks.  He can smell rocks.  And red-headed virgins.  He can smell red-headed virgins from miles away.  He meanders his way through life in various classes of society; he goes from an orphan to a lowly tanner’s assistant to a perfumer’s assistant, to a cave-man-esque hermit, to a man of high standing within his village, to the self-professed ‘Grenouille the Great’.  We see his entire life unfold, right from his birth until his death.  It is quite a momentous work, especially given that it’s able to fit all that into less than three hundred pages without skipping over the years in an irritating manner.  It even includes vast tracts of philosophical thought on life, giving the reader a map of the brain de la Grenouille.

One of the interesting things about this book is that the main character is almost an anti-hero, and in some ways he isn’t the main character at all.  There were definitely parts of the book where we detached from him and our omniscient narrator told us about the activities of other characters in a way that excluded our protagonist completely.  It felt as if I was hearing the story from a witness of certain events who did not know the truth behind them and the way that they secretly involved our main character.  It was interesting, I have to tell you that.

I’m not even sure I liked Grenouille, to tell the truth.  And that makes for an interesting read.  Although I didn’t necessarily like him, his exploits were definitely interesting, yet it was the detachment from emotion at his triumphs and failures that surprised me.  I wouldn’t have cheered for him, if I’d met him in real life I definitely would have avoided him, and the fact that he was the protagonist didn’t stop me from being a little disgusted by some of the things he did (if not all the things that he did).  It’s not a book that you read because the characters are likeable.  You read it because the characters are intriguing and they carry the plot.

There is also, now that I think about it, a sense of inevitability, of fate, in this book.  Perhaps it is the way that it starts right from the very beginning, from Grenouille’s birth, leading to the assumption that it will lead on until his death.  Or perhaps it was the setting – the unforgivable eighteenth century in which nobody really lived very long at all.  Maybe it was his exploits, which you knew would reap some sort of a consequence in the end, which you were just waiting for throughout the whole novel, knowing that things could not go on as they were forever.

In this way, the final scene didn’t surprise me, but then it did.  It was horrible, but unassumingly horrible.  A writer with the sort of descriptive tools that had been used throughout the book didn’t pull them out in this final scene, but left it as is.  In some ways, it’s more shocking that way.  But you will have to read it and tell me what you think.  I won’t say anymore.

Read it if you: are interested in the historical setting, like descriptive passages, like reading the cognitive musings of characters

While reading listen to: Lucia Popp Depuis le jour, Dvorak New World Symphony Movement I, Ravel Gaspard de la Nuit