98. Perfume by Patrick Süskind

Before I go any further I should probably say that this theory of mine may well be completely wrong. I have written to Patrick Süskind for confirmation but received no reply. Not surprising - I imagine he receives a lot of post.

As most readers will know, Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a boy with a preternatural sense of smell who embarks on a homicidal campaign to steal the scents of young women and blend them into a super-perfume that will be able to capture the heart of anyone who smells it. The novel was an enormous international hit after publication in 1987 – deservedly in my opinion – and it was made into a film which I assume to be a load of old cobblers.

But the title Perfume – Das Parfum in German - had an interesting forerunner in a much earlier work, Profumo (‘Perfume’), an Italian novel of 1890 by the verismo writer Luigi Capuana. In Capuana's Perfume there is the same fascination with the scent of the female body: it deals with a young woman who uncontrollably emits the odour of orange blossom. Orange blossom also crops up frequently in the Süskind novel, and at the climax of the book, as Grenouille is about to be executed, ‘from the valley of Grasse a warm wind came up, bearing the scent of orange blossoms.’ Did Süskind read Capuana? The parallels are certainly there, and perhaps Süskind was paying tribute to the Italian maestro when he made Grenouille’s own master an Italian, Giuseppe Baldini.

As a footnote, the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (2003) suggests that Capuana probably derived his theme, in turn, from Ernest Monin's Un nouveau chapitre de semiologie, Essai sur les odeurs des cops humains (Paris, 1885).

Consulted:
Read Profumo online (in Italian) at http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA1080/_IDX013.HTM

Bondanella, Peter E. , Ciccarelli, Andrea: The Cambridge Companion to the Italian novel (2003)