A case of extremes

Patrick Süskind is reclusive, turning down requests for interviews except one, where he promised to reveal everything, including what inspired him to pen "Perfume", on his seventieth birthday. Five years away, without any guarantee.

"Perfume" was his first novel that became an instant bestseller. Hollywood filmmakers and producers scrambled for the rights to bring the book to the big screen for years, almost begging the native of Ambach. It was Tom Tykwer, a German filmmaker renowned for arresting visuals, who would direct it. The premise was intriguing and hard to ignore.

It would be safe to say that the novel was a product of Süskind's imagination, which took him months, even years. The setting was France during the eighteenth century, a few decades before the French Revolution. Morale was low after engaging in successive conflicts with neighboring kingdoms. The Seven Years Wars was the most demoralizing, as the victory of Great Britain turned her into a leading colonial power. The French kingdom got her revenge when it sided with the thirteen American colonies in their attempt to break from the British Empire. The Americans won, earning their independence, but this would add to the French's financial woes. On the other hand, the period was the Age of French Englightenment, dominated by Voltaire and Montesquieu. Out of the decaying corpses and dispirited faces came Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.

Jean-Baptiste was born with an unusual gift, the heightened sense of smell. He could discern a mixture of odors a few meters or a few blocks away, which filled him with a sense of adventure at first. Then came his disgust over the smell of humans. (Was it a comment on the social aspect of the French society?) So he fled the city and spent a number of years alone, in the wilderness, meditating. It was during those moments when he realized that he doesn't have a smell, which comforted him. It even liberated him. So he set out to explore the countryside, only to be attracted to the scent of a virginal woman. What was it about the young lady that drove Jean-Baptiste mad? Süskind may be alluding to something, but readers would overlook it.

Jean-Baptiste realized that his life goal was to create the perfect perfume, with his sense of smell to guide him. It could be achieved with the backdrop essense of twenty four virgins, so he set out on a murder rampage.

The story was absurd, the amoral characters not the kind that Patricia Highsmith would consider for her works. But Jean-Baptiste reflected the extremes that France was undergoing during that time. This would culminate in the Storming of the Bastille, the first of a series of events that would change France forever. Then again, Süskind might be thinking of something else. Truth is stranger than fiction, and there might have been worse cases than Jean-Baptiste's. Everything about the book is despicable, but Süskind turned it into a fable of sort. Only a genius can make such a thing palatable.