Where to Start with Patrick Süskind: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Patrick Süskind — how to approach Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, his singular novel about an eighteenth-century parfumeur with no scent of his own who commits a series of murders in his obsessive quest to create the world's perfect perfume. A complete reading guide.
Patrick Süskind (born 1949 in Ambach, Bavaria) is a German author and screenwriter who published Perfume: The Story of a Murderer in 1985 and became, almost overnight, one of the most talked-about writers in Europe. The novel was translated into more than forty languages, sold over fifteen million copies, and was eventually adapted into a film by Tom Tykwer in 2006. Süskind has been almost entirely absent from public life since the novel’s publication: he grants no interviews, accepts no literary prizes, and has published almost nothing of comparable scope in the four decades since Perfume appeared. He is one of the most famous literary recluses in contemporary fiction.
Where to Start: Perfume (1985)
Perfume is technically unlike any other novel of the twentieth century — narrated entirely through smell, with a protagonist whose genius for fragrance exceeds his capacity for humanity, and a plot that begins with serial murder and ends in something stranger still. Perfume opens in eighteenth-century Paris, which Süskind describes with olfactory specificity that is both documentary and hallucinatory: the fish market, the tanneries, the open sewers, the bodies of people who bathed infrequently in a city without running water. Most historical fiction recreates the past primarily through visual detail; Süskind recreates it through smell, and the effect is disorienting in exactly the right way — it returns a lost world to the reader through the sense most directly connected to memory and emotion.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is one of literature’s most compelling monsters. He is born at the bottom of the social hierarchy, in conditions of radical deprivation, with a physical characteristic — the complete absence of personal odor — that makes him invisible to the sensory world he perceives with such extraordinary precision. Other people navigate him by smell without knowing it; he leaves no trail. He is a ghost in a world he can read perfectly but cannot fully enter. The desire that drives him — to create a scent of such power that it would compel love from anyone who smelled it, to solve by artificial means the problem of his olfactory invisibility — is comprehensible in a way that makes it more disturbing, not less.
The picaresque structure takes Grenouille from his wretched Paris beginnings through an apprenticeship to a master parfumeur, to the perfumers of Grasse in the south of France, where the finest raw materials and the finest techniques converge. Along the way he murders young women whose specific scent he needs for his composition. Süskind renders these murders with clinical distance — from Grenouille’s perspective, they are technical necessities — which is the novel’s most unsettling formal choice.
The ending is genuinely shocking and somehow entirely earned by what precedes it. Süskind has built toward something that most novelists would not attempt, and he lands it: a climax that is simultaneously grotesque, darkly comic, and a perfectly consistent expression of everything the novel has established about Grenouille’s psychology and the world’s capacity for collective delusion.
Why Perfume Is the Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Patrick Süskind, Perfume is the ideal first book because it is his masterpiece, an international bestseller, and the fullest expression of his distinctive gifts, the extraordinary sensory imagination, the dark and gripping storytelling, and the unsettling exploration of obsession and genius. Perfume follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with no personal scent but a supernatural sense of smell, in eighteenth-century France, whose obsession with capturing the perfect scent leads him to murder, in a strange, brilliant, and disturbing novel. As an entry point it is ideal, for it is his most famous work and a perfect example of his singular, sensory, and dark imagination. It welcomes the newcomer with its extraordinary premise, its vivid sensory world, and its gripping, unsettling story, drawing the reader into his distinctive vision. It is his defining work and the one that best represents his gifts, so the new reader encounters Süskind at his finest. For the newcomer, then, Perfume is the natural and ideal starting point, on dark subject matter.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Perfume to be a strange, brilliant, and disturbing novel of obsession and the senses. You can expect an extraordinary premise, for the novel follows a man born with no personal scent but a supernatural sense of smell, obsessed with capturing the perfect scent. You can expect an extraordinary sensory imagination, for Süskind renders the world of smell with astonishing vividness, immersing the reader in scent as no other novel does. You can expect a vivid historical setting, the teeming, malodorous world of eighteenth-century France. You can expect a dark and gripping story, for the protagonist’s obsession leads him to murder. You can expect an exploration of obsession, genius, isolation, and monstrosity. You should be prepared for disturbing material. Expect, in short, a strange, brilliant, and disturbing novel of obsession and the senses, a singular introduction to Süskind’s gifts.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Perfume has introduced you to Süskind’s gifts, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore his other, smaller body of work, recognizing that his reputation rests overwhelmingly on his masterpiece. His other writings include shorter fiction and a novella exploring obsession, art, and the inner life, displaying the same precise, intelligent, and often unsettling sensibility in more concentrated form. Reading these after Perfume deepens your sense of Süskind’s distinctive preoccupations, the fascination with obsession, genius, and the inner life, that animates his most famous book. While none of his other work has matched the impact of Perfume, the reader captivated by it may wish to explore his further writing. Building your reading journey through Süskind is a matter of following his imagination from Perfume into his shorter fiction. The reader who begins here will have encountered one of the most singular and unforgettable novels in modern European literature.
Reading Patrick Süskind
Perfume is Süskind’s essential and only major work. The Pigeon (1987), a short novella about a man undone by a small disruption to his ordered life, and The Story of Mr. Sommer (1991) are the only other fiction available in translation and are minor compared to the novel.
For the full Patrick Süskind bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Patrick Süskind author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Patrick Süskind?
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985, translated from German) is Süskind's essential and only major novel — and one of the most singular works of twentieth-century European fiction. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in 1738 at a Paris fish stall, under a pile of offal, to a mother who immediately tries to abandon him. He survives, possessing the most extraordinary sense of smell in human history and absolutely no odor of his own. This paradox — the world's greatest perceiver of a quality he himself entirely lacks — drives a novel of obsession, murder, and one of literature's most deranged and somehow earned endings. Süskind wrote almost nothing else of comparable scope.
What is Perfume about?
Perfume is about genius without empathy — what it looks like and what it produces. Grenouille can identify the component molecules of any scent, can navigate an entire city by smell alone, can remember and reproduce every fragrance he has ever encountered. He perceives the world with extraordinary richness and cannot perceive other people as anything but olfactory objects. The murders he commits are not the acts of a monster in the conventional sense; they are the acts of an artist who has decided that the ingredients he needs for his masterpiece are more important than the people who carry them. Süskind renders this with a picaresque structure that takes Grenouille from Paris through the perfumers of Grasse to a climax that is grotesque, beautiful, and thoroughly earned.
What makes Perfume technically distinctive?
Süskind wrote a novel centred on the sense of smell in a literary tradition that overwhelmingly privileges sight and sound. The rendering of eighteenth-century Paris through olfactory description — the hierarchy of smells in the city, the specific stench of different districts, the way smell organised social life in ways contemporary readers have forgotten — is a technical achievement almost without parallel in world literature. The capacity to create the subjective experience of smell through language requires not just sensory precision but a complete conceptual reimagining of how to write consciousness in a body. Süskind managed it, which is why the novel is studied alongside the great experiments in consciousness that it technically resembles.
What should I read after Perfume?
After Perfume, Süskind wrote very little — he is famously reclusive and has granted almost no interviews since the novel's publication. His novella The Pigeon (1987) and a short story collection are the only other available work in translation. For literary fiction with comparable darkness and psychological singularity, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian covers adjacent territory — a protagonist of almost supernatural capacity and complete moral emptiness — in a very different landscape. Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind shares the eighteenth-century European atmosphere. Albert Camus's The Stranger covers the amoral observer psychology in a much more compressed form.
