1Genius without humanity
Grenouille can smell glass, brass, and water, can inventory the entire world through his nose, and can recreate a perfume from memory without measuring. What he cannot do is feel affection: as a baby he ignores it, as a child he focuses entirely on smells while other children try to smother him. His ambition is explicitly tyrannical, to rule a world of smells more completely than any ruler, while despising humans for their stench. The book keeps asking whether pure talent, cut off from love, is an achievement or a deformity. By the end, the greatest nose in France has everything except the one thing he wanted, and the book's point is that genius which cannot love ends by consuming itself.
Characters:Jean-Baptiste Grenouille
2Scent as identity
The novel's cruelest joke is that Grenouille, a genius of smell, has no smell of his own. People distrust him from birth: the wet nurse returns him, Father Terrier recoils in horror, children try to smother him. Only when he learns the truth in the cave does he understand why, and only when he wears a manufactured human odor do people finally treat him as a person. Identity, the book suggests, is something others smell before they see. A self that emits nothing must be fabricated from cat shit, vinegar, and stolen essence, and even then it convinces everyone except the man wearing it.
Characters:Jean-Baptiste Grenouille
3The crowd's adoration
The execution scene is the book's thesis in action. One drop of perfume turns ten thousand mourners into worshippers who declare a confessed mass murderer an angel, and the square erupts in an orgy. Antoine Richis, the one clear-thinking man in Grasse, kneels before his daughter's killer and begs to adopt him. Süskind shows adoration as a reflex, not a judgment: the crowd loves the smell, not the man. When Grenouille pours the whole bottle over himself among thieves and whores, they tear him apart out of what they believe is pure love. Worship, the book concludes, is indistinguishable from destruction when it has no object it truly knows.
Characters:Jean-Baptiste GrenouilleAntoine Richis
4Possession and murder
Grenouille's first murder is not lust or cruelty but aesthetics: a red-haired girl's scent overwhelms him, and he kills to keep it, inhaling her until the fragrance fades. Every killing in Grasse follows the same logic, twenty-four girls selected for the quality of their odor, strangled and pressed in fat so their essence can be bottled. Love, in this book, curdles into possession: to adore something completely is to destroy it and keep the trace. The perfume that results makes everyone love its bearer, but it is built entirely out of the dead. The book's point is that possession is the opposite of love, and Grenouille never learns the difference.
Characters:Jean-Baptiste GrenouilleGrenouille's mother
5The putrid and the sublime
The book opens at the most putrid spot in the kingdom, a fish market reeking of offal, and builds toward the most sublime scent ever composed. Grenouille is born among guts and dies among outcasts at the same cemetery, and between those two piles of filth he creates beauty that stops an executioner's arm mid-swing. Süskind refuses to separate the two registers: the divine perfume is made from murdered girls, the angelic vision is devoured by cannibals, purity and rot share every bottle. The point is that the sublime is never far from the abject, and a masterpiece can be the most monstrous thing in the kingdom.
Characters:Jean-Baptiste Grenouille