![]() ![]() ![]() Because she can’t process that Grenouille is odorless, she isn’t offput or alarmed by his creepiness as the other children are. It is in this way, that we become faintly sympathetic toward him and his unshakeable quest to discover it–by whatever means necessary.Ĭontent to live off anything that comes his way, Grenouille grows up in an orphanage run by a soulless woman named Madame Gaillard who has no sense of smell as a result of being stubbed in the face with a fireplace poker as a child. His entire raison d’être, thus, becomes to be able to know what his own personal aroma is. ![]() The irony of Grenouille being unable to smell himself, yet being able to so keenly detect even the kernel of an odor emanating from anyone or anything else is his great blessing and curse. Following the nefarious and odorless Grenouille from his infancy, Süskind shows us a man driven by one thing and one thing only: scent. ![]() Patrick Süskind’s seminal 1985 novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, achieves that rare feat of creating a main character who is both protagonist and antagonist, all while being, of course, completely loathsome to the average person. ![]()
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