Book #243

Reviewer: Sweetp

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a book I’ve had on my ‘to-read’ list for some time. I started reading it with some trepidation since horror isn’t my usual genre of choice, and I was under the impression this was a particularly gruesome book.

I was soon quite engrossed in this story about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who is born in the squalidness of pre-Revolution Paris (1730s) and who has no personal odour.  As he manages to survive a bleak and loveless childhood he discovers he has a ‘gift’ for smells – in that he can smell everything in the world in the most minute detail. The descriptions of Grenouille’s olfactory experiences are lush and you can almost smell them coming off the page – from the suffocating stench of overcrowded Paris with it’s oozing cemeteries, fish markets and tanneries and stinking river, to the sweet scent of all the individual flowers used to make a perfume.

Eventually Grenouille ends up working for a master perfumer, learning how to distill perfumes and extract scents. I found this part of the book quite fascinating (probably my science background coming to the fore) particularly the techniques used in an age without modern laboratory facilities. Pages are devoted to describing the extraction of scents and the manufacture of perfumed oils and other accessories, and I can only wonder at the amount of research that must have gone into this subject. Far from boring, the juxtaposition of the stench of the city with the descriptions of the aristocracy wearing these manufactured perfumes is cleverly done and makes for an interesting historical commentary.

Grenouille is an odd character, freakish in both physical appearance and in temperament. Aloof, disconnected from the world around him, and seemingly without any sense of social propriety or conscience he increasingly becomes obsessed with his gift and embarks on a journey to learn other techniques for extracting scents. He uses his new found skills to extract the scent of inanimate objects, creating art-like “masterpieces”.

He was enchanted by their meaningless perfection; and at no time in his life, either before or after, were there moments of such truly innocent happiness as in those days when he playfully and eagerly set about creating fragrant landscapes, still lifes, and studies of individual objects.

Soon his obsession reaches new heights, and eventually he begins to murder in order to possess the scent of beautiful young girls.

The murder aspect of the book begins at roughly the 75% mark. Perfume: the story of *murder* it really isn’t and my assumptions about gruesomeness or gore were totally unfounded. The book doesn’t dwell on the violence, but more on the increasingly bizarre behaviours of Grenouille and the obsessive nature of his quest to possess the scents and his ability to catalogue them inside himself. As titled, the novel is really the story of a *murderer* – Grenouille – and he is not an easy character to empathize with. While his originality and creativity are almost admirable, to be honest there’s not a lot to like here. The obsession that drives him is pretty creepy and the overall tone of the book smells like a sinister Gothic horror.

This isn’t a long book and I read it quite quickly. The magical realism themes occur near the end of the book and will be a disappointment for some readers. The end perhaps is not as strong as the rest of the book, but to my mind Grenouille’s final ‘decision’ seemed a fitting end to his story.

He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.

Book #157

Reviewer: SweetP (first published 5 August 2012)

Smilla Jaspersen thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. When her six year old neighbour falls to his death she is convinced that his death was the result of foul play and not an accident as the police believe. As a Greenlander, Smilla has always felt at odds with her new home in Denmark, and she is lead back to the icy frontier of her roots as she begins to unravel the mystery surrounding the boy’s death.

This book is hard to categorise, and describe. At times it sweeps the reader away on achingly beautiful and poetic descriptions, there’s a real sense of atmosphere – ice becomes a character of its own, and the cold seeps out of the pages. And then in the turn of the page there is a clunkiness to the prose that grates and made me feel like something had been lost in translation. (The book was originally written in Danish).

Smilla is at turns, provocative, with an inner strength that is admirable as she hunts for the truth, and then at other times her motivations are a mystery, or she utters something that seems just plain… odd. She portrays a sense of aloofness, a disconnection with the world around her which at the beginning was interesting, but by the end I felt like her voice had been lost a little. The plot too, at this point seemed to ramp up to ‘the big reveal’ only for it to feel forced and the ending rushed and incomplete.  I also remember feeling this way about the film adaptation that I watched many years ago – there is very little I remember about the film actually (except that Gabriel Byrne starred) but I do recall a sense of disbelief that the ending ‘went there’.

That being said, the setting was incredibly fascinating. The ‘sense of snow’ was incredibly evocative and exotic. We, in New Zealand, have one word for snow – the Inuit people have so many – Smilla’s gift for the ice was probably the thing that held the book together for me. I didn’t know anything about Denmarks’s relationship with Greenland and the issues globalisation has caused there – so that too was something I enjoyed learning more about.

I have a suspicion that this book will linger in my mind for a long time, but I don’t think I will be rushing to reread. I gave it 3/5 stars.

Book # 790

Reviewer: Sweetp

When I was growing up I used to love listening to Jeff Wayne’s musical version of the War of the Worlds. In my mind, I can instantly recall the sound of Richard Burton’s deep voice narrating – “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.” Some twenty years later, I watched the story immortalised on the big screen by Tom Cruise and Spielberg, but it was only recently that I actually read the novel.

H.G. Wells published this book in 1898, long before moon landings, satellites, and humans living aboard space stations. His alien invaders, complete with destruction rays and gruesome feeding machines, would be just as horrifying if this story was set a hundred years later, and in that aspect this novel has lost none of its appeal, or impact. As a window into the beginnings of the science-fiction genre there is possibly nothing better.

Where this novel really shines though, is in the exploration of human nature – how different people cope in the face of disaster, and the lengths they will go to, to survive. The idea of the hunter becoming the hunted will appeal to all those who enjoy post-apocalyptic reads or themes of oppression, colonization and war. The story is narrated by a man who is witnessing the invasion first hand – his intelligent but often panicked version of events, gives an authentic, urgent immediacy to the novel as the horrifying events unfold.

At times the language feels a little stilted in a quaint Victorian way, but the book is also very short, and nothing is dragged out longer than it needs to be. Even being intimately familiar with the plot, I still found this to be an enjoyable and quick read.

I rated this 4/5 stars, a classic that should be on everyone’s “I’ve read this” list.