Perfume by Patrick Súskind attracted my attention on our bookshelf in Sicily.  On the cover was the face of a beautiful, red-haired girl, and the announcement that it was now a major film.  (The novel was first published in German in 1985; it was translated and published in English in 1986; it appeared as a Penguin paperback in 1987.)

One of the teasers inside the front cover, attributed to the Daily Mail said, “Horrid it may be, but Mr. Súskind’s tale is well written and most unusual.”  That convinced me.

Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who was born in Paris in 1738.  His mother worked at a fish stall in the slums, where she had given birth on four previous occasions, and like those four births, she shovelled Grenouille under her table to be discarded with the fish offal.  However, she was arrested, found guilty of infanticide, and executed.  He was assigned to a wet nurse and passed from orphanage to orphanage.  As a young child he developed an extraordinary sense of smell, and he memorised thousands of individual scents.  As a boy, he became an apprentice to a tanner.  Then he had the opportunity to become the apprentice to a perfumer whose creative energies had deserted him.  With Grenouille working for him, though, he began to produce the most exquisite, expensive and in-demand perfumes.

At one point, Grenouille discovered a perfectly captivating and magical scent.  He traces it through the streets of Paris and found that it was coming from a young and beautiful girl.  He killed her, striped her naked and gorged himself on her scent.

As an apprentice perfumer in Paris he learned most of the skills necessary to capture particular scents, but later, he went to Grasse, where he learned how to capture the most elusive scents.  Once again he discovers a magical scent and he traces it to the young daughter of an important official.  He kills her, too, and extracts her scent to make the most magnificent scent.  He is arrested, found guilty and sentenced to death, but he manages to escape death in Grasse, only to be murdered in Paris.

This is, as the Daily Mail suggests, a pretty horrid tale, but it is delivered in good, solid literary style.  Moreover, Herr Súskind knows enough about the perfume business to make almost credible the extraordinary skill of his main character.  Almost credible, but sometimes my mind boggled at some of Grenouille’s concoctions, and the distances over which he could trace the particular scent of one human being.  There is no accounting for Grenouille’s extraordinary skill: no medical, or evolutionary theory or precedent is put forward.

Grenouille, himself, is a despicable character in whom one cannot find even the least redemptive feature.  This is a weakness in the novel: a reader needs a motivation beyond lucid prose and a desire to know what’s next to keep on reading.

There is an interlude where Grenouille sequesters himself as a hermit in a mountain.  It is not clear to me why he did this or how this interlude contributes to the development of the character or the plot.

At the end of the novel, the author allows some inconsistency in the reaction of crowds of people to Grenouille’s ultimate perfume: in one case, they love him, in the other, they kill him.

This is a well-written, unique fantasy.  I did not find it gruesome. I would have liked it better if it were allegorical, or if it stretched my credibility a little less.

The Iranian Scorpion received an Honorable Mention in the DIY Book Festival:

The Daily Telegraph ran a story about a month ago on a report by the British Publishers Association on their sales for 2012.  Sales were up 4% to £3.3 billion.  What was particularly interesting was the split between hard copy books and ebooks.  Hard copy books accounted for the vast majority of the sales at £2.9 billion.  This represented a decline of just 1% over the year.  Ebook sales were up 66% to £441 million.  Of these total ebook sales, £216 million represented the digital market for fiction and non fiction, and while this figure represented an increase of 134% over 2011, the increase in 2011 over 2010 was 366%!  This very significant decrease in the rate of growth of fictional and non-fiction ebooks suggests that there is a resilience of printed books.

Comparisons were made with the music industry where 70-80% of sales are digital.  Benedict Evans, an industry analyst at Enders said: “We’ve had this first surge of e-reader ownership, but they are not a direct substitution like digital music.  With digital music, you were replacing one piece of consumer electronics with a better piece of consumer electronics. . . . An e-reader or tablet is not better than a book.  It is better in some ways, but it is different.  There are genres such as romance, sci-fi and business it really works for, where people  are often impatient to get new titles or have no physical attachment to the book as an object.

The article was accompanied by comments by Gaby Wood, Head of Books at the Telegraph.  He said: “First, digital books are a compliment to, not a replacement for, physical books.  Some publishers  now offer a hardback with an ebook as a package, since an ebook is easier to carry around, but a hardback is what you want to own, and have on your shelf.  What has suffered is the middle ground affordable paperbacks, especially fiction, since this is easiest to read digitally.  Second, children’s books are doing very well – physically and digitally – and garnering well-deserved attention.  Third, publishers who have a popular cookery book writer on their lists will continue to sell hardbacks for a good while to come”  (See Nigella Lawson’s latest book cover, below). . . . “Book jacket designers recognise the need to make their physical products covetable objects.”

I had a rare literary experience recently.  A friend of mine, Peter Skala and his wife, Barbara, came to dinner, and they brought with them a recently published book about Peter.  The book is written by Peter’s long time friend and business partner, David Hutt.  Barbara has written a self-published autobiography, My Life as Me, which I have read, and I was eager to read the ‘sequel’ about Peter.  Briefly, Peter was born in Austria in the mid 1920’s; his mother was a well-known actress; his father was a business man, so he came from a comfortable middle class.  As you know, the 1930’s were a time of political and social turmoil in Austria.  Peter’s family had Jewish connections which were a distinct liability in Austria at that time, so Peter, who is Christian, and the rest of his family fled to the US.  Peter, en-route to the US, spent a year in the UK as a teenager.  He went to school in New York and joined the US Army, where he became an officer whose German language skills were put to good use in General Patton’s army.  He later went to Yale (my alma mater), worked as a key manager in several large multi-nationals and became a successful head hunter.

I have posted the following review of The Boy Who Wore White Stockings on Amazon:

This book is a captivating historical biography. David Hutt decided to write a biography of his friend and business partner, Peter Skala, but, in addition, he has included an examination of Peter’s genealogy back for about two centuries. This reminds one of The Hare with Amber Eyes, and like that story, it often makes fascinating reading from cultural, political, sociological, perspectives. Mr. Hutt is clearly a skilled, and dedicated researcher, and while the output of his research captures the reader’s attention, the linkages between the genealogy and the biography are somewhat tenuous, except when Peter’s grandparents arrive on the scene. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, it was the netsuke that made the inter-generational connections.
For me, there were three parts of this book: the genealogy, Peter’s childhood/boyhood, and Peter’s early adulthood. (Will there be a sequel about the rest of Peter’s adulthood? One hopes so!) One disappointment about the section on Peter’s childhood/boyhood, is that one hears the voice of Peter himself too infrequently. I know that Peter would have pungent comments about many of the events which are reported.
The section on Peter’s early adulthood, with particular emphasis on his war-time experiences makes fascinating reading, and his voice is there.
David Hutt is clearly a very talented researcher and writer. I am certainly ready for the sequel!

Peter is a very clever man with a pungent, ironical sense of humor.  Faced with any controversy, he will come straight to the point.  For me, it was quite interesting to read about the environment in which he grew up, because it gave me a sense of how the character I know came to be.  Briefly, in the past, he has talked about his experiences in France during the Second World War, but this biography includes some episodes of which I had known nothing (including how he captured a German general and obtained the surrender of a German platoon without firing a shot!)

I’m afraid that the chances of a sequel are fairly slim.  The Boy Who Wore White Stockings ends just before Peter met Barbara. I suspect that David Hutt doesn’t want to stand between Peter and Barbara in writing about what happened next