Perfume, by Patrick Suskind

An 18th-century perfumer searches for the perfect scent - that of young virgin girl.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born unloved and unwanted into 18th-century France. His mother is executed and he is forced into dangerous and pitiless child labour. Disease almost kills him off, but he's a scrappy youth and manages to survive. The child has one skill: he is possessed of the most sensitive olfactory nerves. His ability to distinguish a wide variety of smells - from the disgusting to the delightful - puts him on track to enter the perfumer's trade. This he does with considerable success. There is one smell that obsesses him, however. The scent of young virgin girls. Early in the novel, he clobbers one unsuspecting victim, killing her in the process. This is the beginning of a quest to distill the unique smell of pubescent virgin girls. 

One wonders what sort of public greeting Perfume would get today, considering its perverse subject matter (it has sold 20 million copies worldwide.) While reading this novel, other decadent writers came to mind: the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature and Matthew Lewis's The Monk. Patrick Suskind's writing is often witty and funny. The plotting is clever and the filthy Paris of the 18th-century is brilliantly imagined (the novel should really be called "putrescence". It's hard to figure out what the novel's theme is, however. Is it about sexual obsession? Disgust at nature's inevitable decay? Perhaps the latter. 

An enjoyable enough read, one that left me a little queasy, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to others.

Perfume, by Patrick Suskind. Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780241420294