Krishna
This is a truly strange amalgamation. On one side, the power of narration is great. It is in turns so funny and so tragic in turns that it sweeps you along in its narrative powers. In some cases, it becomes truly absurd and you stop and say ‘What the hell happened to the author here?’
The novel is by a German author and I do not know if the original is even better than the English version but the translation, as I mentioned, is top class.
In its juxtaposition of the absurd and the sublime, it kind of reminds you of One Hundred Years of Solitude that we have reviewed earlier here.
The story? Let us see.
Jean Baptiste Grenouille an 18 century man who was gifted and abominable. Patrick talks of the eighteenth century France as a place where everything stank – streets with manure, sewers overflowing, even meat and blood stench everywhere and says that even aristocrats smelled.
Jean was born to a street vendor woman who tried to deliver him right there in the meat shop and kill him like she did her earlier four children but his loud voice saved him and his mother was tried and confessed. She was executed and Jean was brought up in many foster homes.
The kid was terrible and the wet nurse refuses to feed him any more. The priest also sees the devil in the baby and gives it away in the care of a far nunnery. The baby (named Grenouille) was now looked after by Madame Gaillard, an emotionless soul who had lost her sense of smell completely due to childhood abuse. The smell is an overarching theme in the plot, whereby you can smell evil if you had the sense of smell and you were impervious to it, if you did not. The title should have given away the motif, I suppose.
Now Grenouille grows up unable to speak easily but having a phenomenal memory for smells. He also grows up completely void of any emotion.
When he finds a unique smell, he tracks it down to a girl – and kills her to retain the scent with him ‘forever’.
Meanwhile the great Baldini is driven mad by a new upstart called Pelissier who seems to be coming up with new perfume after new perfume that is quite the rage and Baldini cannot even fathom what ingredients he puts in there even to copy them! Then Grenouille arrives to deliver skins and to plead with Baldini to take him as an assistant.
When he conjures up the exact mix of the perfume Baldini was trying to replicate and also creates another which is superior with no method in his process at all, Baldini buys him outright and also forces him to follow regular process so he could write down all the genius creations of Grenouille. The latter learns other perfume process – for example, distillation of essences from the flowers.
Grenouille is now thinking of how he can put all his skills to better use for himself. But he falls sick and is near dying when he realized that distillation does not succeed everywhere. After coming back to life, he negotiates his own release to learn other techniques from Baldini, who is now a very rich man, thanks to Grenouille’s skills.
Baldini dies in his sleep in a coincidental flooding accident. Grenouille finds himself in an isolated cave and revels in his solitude. He stays there seven years.
The narration is absolutely fantastic. The way Baldini distrusts Grenouille until the very last moment, the way Grenouille revels in perfumes, all of these are told in exquisite prose that simply carries you along.
Then comes a stupid twist. Once he realizes that he himself has no odour at all, Grenouille goes to pieces and returns to civilization, looking like a cave man and is ‘adopted’ by a scientist who wants to make him recover to support his outlandish theories.
But the story moves where he ‘makes’ a human smell and passes for a ‘normal human being’. He is working as an apprentice to a rich lady perfumer. He manages to gain the trust of her and her husband who is the chief worker and manages the perfumery by himself.
Now he realizes that he needs to get the essence of a girl whom he smelled and who is better than his first love and he knows that the only way to possess her is to kill her and take her scent, just like he did for the others.
He starts collecting beautiful virgins. When they are found murdered in a sequence, th town goes into a panic and – this is the other unbelievable part – the father of the girl, Richis (the daughter’s name is Laure) ‘knows’ that the murderer wants his girl as the ‘final trophy’ and moves her away to another city after an elaborate subterfuge to make people believe that he was taking her to Cabris when he was taking her to Napoule.
There is a fascinating scene where Grenouille follows them by scent alone and catches up with them at the inn. When they are asleep, he plans to enter Loure’s room, murder her there itself and collect his final perfume.
You expect that the father Richis, with his brilliant planning will save the day – you are trained by years of reading such novels. But what happens is unexpected. I will leave it unsaid.
There are some crazy passages here (the weird side) where Richis wishes that Laure was not his own daughter so that ‘he could have married her’
Much later in the story, Grenouille is caught and is sentenced to death by crucifixion, and what happens when he is brought over for the final death in front of thousands of people baying for his blood is also very twisty but in the sense of the absurd.
Finally, how Gernouille ends up is another unexpected turn.
The book tells you that our sense of smell is very acute and influences us in innumerable ways and by just altering the smell, you can alter how a person is perceived. It is ironic that Grenouille, the man with ‘no body odour whatsover’ is the person blessed with the most acute sense of smell and could concoct perfumes that can drive people literally mad.
Nice story, if you can get over the absurd plot twists.
6/10
– – Krishna (August 2019)