Perfume: a summary.

This book starts off with the birth of a baby (if you can even call it that), called Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in a rancid food market built atop a cemetery and ends with an orgy of beyond biblical proportions right before the protagonist himself decides to end his life in a way which manages to both shock and fascinate readers. Grenouille, the protagonist, is born unloved and devoid of a personal odour. But he has an over-developed sense of smell. He is able to smell anything and everything, except himself. His sense of smell is so sharp that it becomes something that is both a blessing and a curse.

The sense of smell is the one sense that is inevitably tied to living. In order to live you must breathe and consequently, in order to breathe you must smell. It is considered a curse because he cannot escape the stench of other human beings. It is a blessing in the sense that he is able to classify every tinge of a particular smell, and in addition to that, capable of combining separate elements and turn them into new and amazing scents. At first, he tries to avoid all humans by retreating to a cave in the highest region, the peak of the mountains where he became a habitant for seven consequtive years. He is then deeply attracted to the purest of human scents; virgins who are just reaching the age when they are "budding" or "blossoming" which ultimately leaves him intoxicated and hungry for more. Thus he begins his conquest of capturing and preserving this scent and he makes this the ultimate goal in his life.

Nothing could stop Grenouille, for he is compared to a devil, a tick, a god. He doesn't believe in the existence of God for he has no use for God as he builds himself a world where he alone is the creator and therefore is superior to everyone else. He often retreats to his self-created world and this is where readers are engulfed into his personal thoughts. There are many and obvious and conspicuous references to him as a twisted and intricated form of God.

"And when he saw that is was good and that the whole earth was saturated with his divine Grenouille seeds, then Grenouille the Great let descend a shower of rectified spirit . . . Then Grenouille the Great commanded the rain to stop. And it was so... And Grenouille the Great saw that it was good, very, very good. And he caused the wind of his breath to blow across the land." - pg 130/131

He figures out a way to create a human scent for himself, since he finally, by accident discovers the fact that he, Grenouille is deprived of a personal scent.

"He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but superhuman, an angel's scent, so indescribably good and vital that whoever smelled it would be enchanted and with his whole heart would have to love him, Grenouille, the bearer of the scent." - pg 160/161

In the end, he is captured for his crimes (killing young virgins to obtain their scent to create his ultimate perfume) and is sentenced to death. On the verge of his execution, he sprinkles his ultimate perfume on himself. Quickly enough, this turned into a mass orgy. Everyone who smelled him saw him as pure good and innocent. They love him (even if they don't know him and even for the terrible things he had done) and couldn't believe that he was guilty! (even Richis, the second consul himself forgets about the fact that Grenouille murdered his precious daughter and is willing to take Grenouille as his son.) These people were so overcome with rapture that,

"It was as if the man had ten thousand invisible hands and had laid a hand on the genitals of the ten thousand people surrounding him and fondled them in just the way that each of them, whether man or woman, desired in his or her most secret fantasies. The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ." - pg 247

It's fascinating how easy it is for people to lose their sense for a smell of another human. Here, readers can see that rationality is completely lost for primitive animal instincts thus leaving a question for the readers to ponder: ultimately, taking every other factor out of the equation, which is more powerful, sense or scent?

The ending is very intricating and so unpredictable. At first, I myself wasn't sure how Suskind was going to conclude the novel in a way that would help the readers to understand the overall message. But he manages to sum everything up in a very ingenious way; Grenouille sprays the whole bottle of his ultimate perfume on himself in a crowd of people, making him so irresistable that everyone wants a piece of him, leaving him to die a tragic but significant death.