Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 historical fiction novel by German author Patrick Suskind, originally published under the name Das Parfum. Patrick Suskind is an author and screenwriter who works primarily in the magical realism genre. He is best known for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (published in English a year later in 1986), which is also his only full-length novel. He has published three novellas, a collection of short stories, a play, and an essay collection, as well as writing the screenplay for the 1997 film Rossini. Notoriously reclusive, Suskind lives in Munich, and very little is known about his personal life.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer tells the tale of an 18th-century French orphan, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is born with an exceptional sense of smell but is rejected by society. Being able to distinguish a vast array of scents is very useful for his work in the perfume trade, but his thoughts turn to murder when he encounters a girl with the most wonderful scent he’s ever smelled. Perfume explores themes of obsession and the charismatic power of evil, as well as the relationship between scent and emotion. It is one of the most successful modern German novels, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide in 49 different languages. It received widespread critical acclaim and was the winner of the 1987 PEN Translation prize for its English-language release. A German-language film adaptation premiered in 2006, and the book has been adapted in different forms including a Russian musical and references in pop and rock songs.

This study guide was composed using the First Vintage International Edition, published in 2001 by Vintage International, an imprint of Random House Inc.

Content Warning: The source material contains depictions of violence, murder, suicidal ideation, and cannibalization.

Plot Summary

The novel opens in Paris, France in 1738. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born to a mother who is arrested, accused of killing a previous child. Effectively an orphan, Jean-Baptiste is first given into the care of a wet nurse but is subsequently dropped off at a local orphanage after his wet nurse fears he may be possessed by the devil. He is repeatedly rejected due to his difficult personality, and at the age of eight, he is apprenticed to a tanner. At this point, no one knows about his extraordinary olfactory abilities, which allow him to distinguish smell as easily as others would distinguish between different shades of color. This allows him to perform apparently magical tricks, like identifying bad vegetables by the smell of worms or telling who is approaching a house. He is able to navigate in darkness by smell alone.

One day, after memorizing all the smells in the city, he is surprised by something he’s never smelled before. He traces it and finds that the source is a young virgin girl who has just entered puberty. She’s only a few years younger than Grenouille. He becomes obsessed with possessing her scent and believes it must be his and his alone. He stalks and kills her, staying with the body until the scent has gone. He subsequently becomes an apprentice to the once-great perfumer Baldini. He proves himself to be an amazing perfumer, and Baldini teaches him the science of perfume, showing him how distillation can be used to preserve a wide range of odors. He tells Grenouille that some unique scents can only be found in Grasse, part of the French Riviera and the heartland of the perfumer’s craft.

As he travels to Grasse, Grenouille discovers that he is disgusted by the scent of humanity. Seeking to avoid it, he decides to live in a mountain cave and avoid people. However, after spending seven years in his cave, he realizes that he himself has no scent. He then travels to Montpellier, concocting a story about being kidnapped to cover for his reappearance. He creates several different perfumes that mimic human scents, each carefully crafted to fool and manipulate people based on a particular reaction that Grenouille wants to elicit. Realizing that he had been ostracized all these years because of his lack of scent, his disdain for humanity is renewed, and he looks down on other people for being fooled so easily. He revels in the fact that he can create a scent that will make people perceive him any way he likes, even as superhuman.

Reaching Grasse, he trains further in how to extract and preserve scents. One day, he encounters a scent even more fascinating than that of his first victim. It belongs to a young girl named Laure Richis. Grenouille decides this time he’ll preserve her scent physically. He begins stalking and killing teenage girls to practice bottling their scents. He doesn’t molest them but harvests their whole heads of hair before killing them. Laure’s father realizes his daughter is being stalked and tries to take her to a safe place. However, Grenouille follows them, kills Laure, and bottles her scent. Soon afterward, he’s caught, placed on trial, and sentenced to death.

On the way to his execution, he wears a new scent that creates awe and love in others. The crowd is soon drawn to him, and everyone believes he is innocent. He is released as a result, and even Laure’s father wishes to adopt him as his son. The scent causes the entire town to participate in a mass orgy that no one ever speaks of again. Grenouille realizes that he hates people. Returning to Paris, he finds the spot in the old cemetery where he was born, waits until nightfall, and then drenches himself in the entire bottle of the same perfume he used in Grasse. A small crowd descends upon him immediately, so obsessed with the scent that they would do anything to get a piece of him. They tear him to shreds, cannibalizing him in the process. The participants are left shocked and embarrassed by their actions but have the odd feeling they did it out of love.