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1700s: A greater and more evocative story about perfume and the art of its creation you will never find
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
What you need to know before your trail
Set in the slums of eighteenth-century France
A young child, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift: an absolute sense of smell. as he grows up his nose is his most precious treasure and when he becomes an apprentice at a well known perfumer, he learns about the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs.
But Grenouille’s thirst for knowledge as well as his genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there. He is hungry, desperate to find and capture smells and fragrances of objects, the essence of them and their soul.
Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin.
Travel Guide
The journey starts in Paris and takes Grenouille, born in the gutters, across the Massif Central, Montpellier before finally arriving in Grasse, the home of French perfume.
A boy who is born in 18th Paris on one of the hottest days in summer, amid a stinking pile of fish guts may not have the best start in life, but already you can see, imagine and of course smell the environment of this novel. such vivid writing conjures such evocative smells.
The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of manure, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spooled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets……
A bottle of dark brow liquid concentrate that stood in his locked cabinet alongside the many other bottles from which he mixed his fashionable perfumes
This talent soon spirals out of control as he goes from one place to another trying to find the ultimate one which will hopefully endear him to many. The way in which the process of detecting and obtaining odeurs is quite amazing and to say it is evocative of all the senses is to not give it the justice it needs –
Contained within it was the magic formula for everything that could make a scent, a perfume, great: delicacy, power, stability, variety and terrifying irresistible beauty
This special scent he thinks will come from a virgin and so to obtain it he soon has to start killing them.
Paris might be a place of dark dank canals, alleyways and turgid establishments – but this makes the world of perfume all the more clear and at first sweet smelling. When the perfume and the art of perfume take on the stench of death, you will feel your gut react and you may need to take some smelling salts, powerful as it is.
Booktrailer Review
Susan:
An interesting premise this – a boy who has no personal odour, who appears strange to many but who has a nose who can smell and detect what no one else can, someone who can not only smell but feel and experience the fragrances he finds on the most everyday objects.This books is gruesome and fascinating in equal measure – you can smell the sweat and the blood from the page, whilst others doft their more welcoming fragrances as you turn the pages. There is something about this novel that has made me want to read it to see if this world is real an it is for every time I’ve been back I’m been as immersed and both drawn to and reviled by it at the same time.
There is also something to be said about perfume and its origins here and the fact that I will never look at Grasse in the same way again! But happily it’s only fiction, it’s just that it seems so real it’s left its aroma with me ever since.
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