Reviews

Scent is power in this book, so much so that it gives you a multitude of identities. It can also take you back to your most nostalgic memories. A scent can make you desire, hate, love. Most importantly, a scent can also create; another world, a memory, a different identity.

There were many beautiful paragraphs in which the author had described the power of scent—I could almost smell it myself. The way things were described so lyrically with his words made it very enjoyable for me as a reader. I was seeing, I was smelling, I was completely in the book.

When Baldini first smelled the scent Grenouille had made, memory overpowered him.

“Baldini closed his eyes and watched as the most sublime memories were awakened in him. He saw himself as a young man walking through the evening gardens of Naples, he saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses… it was something completely new… capable of creating a whole world.”

A scent, or perhaps your scent, is also capable of stripping layers of who you are and revealing your soul, bare and awfully human. When baby Grenouille smelled Terrier, he panicked and felt exposed:

“The child with no smell was smelling shamelessly. And all at once he felt as if he stank, he felt naked and ugly. The child seemed to be smelling right through his skin, into his inwards. His most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts.”

All that being said, Grenouille never had a scent of his own, no identity, and therefore, to him, no presence. He lacks identity in a society that doesn’t perceive what it cannot smell. And that truly makes me think… do we only exist in relation to how others perceive us? And so, he ends up crafting identities of his own—divine, seductive, invisible, even repulsive.

I think that another main point in this book is that Grenouille does not kill out of malice. He kills out of desire for something so pure, so intoxicating to him… and when he was caught, rightfully so, the people were about to execute him—until he sprayed himself with the scent he had crafted. That desire that was in it… those exact same people not only forgave him but worshipped him. And that tells us, as readers, one thing… desire itself does not need morality; it is raw, sensual, destructive at times… but not always moral. Humans will justify anything if it feels right, as the last line had said:

“They smiled, for they had done something out of love.”

It is horrifying, but it can be true, that desire, when powerful enough to some people, can justify almost anything… because those consumed by it don’t act out of rationality but simply out of emotions.

The book takes a cynical take on human nature that suggests we are always very easily controlled, very easily manipulated by our senses, by our desires. Do I think that we are completely victims of sensory illusion? Not necessarily, even if the book suggests that love, morality, and identity are purely chemical reactions.

But despite all that… the book is brutally honest because yes, humans sometimes justify their crimes because it feels right. We see it in politics, in wars, in relationships.

I would say the only problem I had with the writing was the pacing. It would be silly to say the problem was the book’s themes because I assume whoever picked it up knew it was going to be dark and heavy. However, the pacing often confused me… we would read three chapters about a single event, like him going to the mountains, but then… him getting caught or him committing the murders of the 24 girls were all written in less than a page. It was a slow read for me, especially the first 130 pages—it kept dragging on… we only really see plot happening by chapter 40. Which isn’t something I dislike in most books, but in this case, I felt like the pace was very confusing.

Nonetheless, it was very beautifully written, with beautiful prose and description.

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