Patrick Süskind

Patrick Süskind is a reclusive German author whose novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a darkly brilliant portrait of obsession and creation set in eighteenth-century France.

Patrick Süskind is one of the most private figures in contemporary European literature — he rarely grants interviews, avoids photographs, and lives outside public life with a determination that has made him as interesting as his subject matter. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, published in German in 1985 and translated into English the following year, is his most famous work and one of the strangest successful novels published in the twentieth century. It follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in eighteenth-century Paris without a personal scent but with an extraordinary olfactory gift, who becomes a perfumer and then a serial killer in pursuit of the perfect scent.

Süskind narrates the story with the detached voice of a biographer chronicling a historical curiosity, which creates an uncanny effect: the reader is drawn into complicity with a monster through the calm authority of the prose. The novel is also a meditation on art and creation — on the obsessive pursuit of an impossible ideal — and on the relationship between beauty and violence. The historical world of eighteenth-century Paris and Grasse is rendered with dense, sensory specificity.

Perfume is not a comfortable book. Its protagonist is irredeemably evil and the novel offers no moral framework with which to contain him. Some readers find the ending preposterous; others find it the perfect absurdist conclusion to a fable that was never meant to be realistic. Süskind wrote relatively little after this novel, but Perfume established him firmly among the distinctive European literary voices of his generation.