Rating: 
Summary: A UNIQUE PIECE OF LITERATURE.
Review: By far, this novel is one of the strangest and most unique novels I have ever read in my life. I dont want to repeat the summary of the book, which has been mentioned more than 200 times by other reviewers but I must say that this would be the first book ever that would grab your nose and drag it all across France. You will come across many books that would visually discribe France during the 18th century, but a book that would describe its smell during that time, not likely. Not only that, but you will also read and look at a murder crime from the murderer's point of view, keeping the judgement to you. After reading this book, I am now a big fan of Patrick Suskind as it must have taken a great deal of creativity to write a book like that. I am not sure if everybody will like this book, but everyone must read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Can you smell 'Tedium'?
Review: This is, indeed, an interesting read but better suited, I think, to a short story. The book is short on plot and devoid of basic characterizations. It is all about intense olfactory descriptions that, frankly, I found pretty tedious after awhile. At one point the main character spends seven years in a cave with no communication with the outside world. I, too, felt a stifling claustrophobia and couldn't wait to be through with the book. I appreciate the author's inventiveness but be warned that this is not a typical historical novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Sympathetic Grotesque
Review: From its bitterly humorous opening chapters to it devastating conclusion, "Perfume" will leave you sniffing the air to catch a mere droplet of Grenouille's olfactory confections. The novel propels you into the world of Jean-Bapiste Grenouille, a extraordinarly gifted monster who discovers that he has been born scentless. Grenouille uses his highly developed, preternatural sense of smell to harvest his very own "master scent," a scent that can render humanity powerless under its influence. To be sure, Grenouille does not immediately inspire feelings of compassion. His crimes are heinous, and his motives are feral in nature. Yet as he plans the introduction his indomitable perfume, you'll come to understand his desperation. However gruesome you might find him to be at first, inevitably you realize there has always been something of a monster in each of us. Replete with vivid character colorations, irony, and oblique social commentary, "Perfume" is a novel you'll want to experience again and again.
Rating:
Summary: banality of evil-not
Review: Please read this novel novel! Utterly engrossing anti-hero, perfectly inhuman (unhuman, rather) Follows all the rules of a Nietzschean superman - in other words, only the rules his own strange genius dictates! The language, even in translation, is at once spare and lyrical. The story is magical in its fantasy and horror. It's like a mix of Camus and Balzac, meets ... Mary Shelley. The literal climax is the logical and grotesque conclusionary comment on civilization. Sidebar: Nirvana's song "Scentless Apprentice" was inspired by this book, Kurt Cobain's favorite. I can also recommend Suskind's The Pigeon, another existential look at an alien consciousness ... tho five degrees less lurid.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the strangest books you'll ever read
Review: Almost impossible to describe, PERFUME is one of the oddest and most unique books you'll ever read. Set centuries ago, if follows the life of a very emotionally crippled child (later adult) with a hugely sensitive sense of smell. Our "hero" becomes a master perfume maker and almost becomes dangerously obsessed with making a perfume that captures the essence, the very purity of a lovely virgin. Weird, huh? The book, though compared to "literature" by some of the reviews here, moves very quickly and doesn't feel difficult to read at all. It does take a lot of time telling you about the manufacture of perfumes, but to be quite honest, this stuff is VERY fascinating the way it is presented here. The book has moments of dry humor, moments of drama, and moments of pure, over-the-top grotesqueness. You've never read a book with a main character anything remotely like this. You've never followed a plot at all similar. And the ending is unexpected as well. It's not exactly a "feel-good" read, but when you're done, you'll have the unusual feeling of having gone down a literary road that's never been traveled before. Highly, highly recommended. Just keep an open mind!!!
Rating:
Summary: Wild and Original
Review: I loved this book. One of the creepiest, most original and interesting books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: FEE, FIE, FOE, FUM...
Review: This is a novel so beautifully written that it transcends into literature. Ingenious in its conception and carefully crafted, the author has created a unique and dazzling work of fiction. Divided into three parts, the book tells the story of a most unusual life, that of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. The first part of the book establishes that he was born to a woman who was hung from a gibbet for having left him to die. It turns out that Jean-Baptiste is an unusual baby. He gives people the willies, because, unlike most babies, Jean-Baptiste has no scent. Over time, Jean-Baptiste develops into a boy with a secret gift. His olfactory sense is developed to a degree unheard of in humans. He delights in parsing the odors around him. Ugly, friendless, and a loner, he eventually ventures into the city of Paris, a malodorous and pungent cornucopia of smells. Believe me, there is plenty to sniff out in eighteenth century Paris! Jean-Baptiste savors each whiff, and the book conveys these olfactory delights with meticulous, descriptive precision. His bleak existence is transformed, however, when he one day captures a heady scent of such exquisite beauty that he finds himself obsessed with it. Determined to have that scent at all costs, he eventually sniffs it out. It turns out to be the scent of a young virgin on the cusp of flowering into a woman. It is a scent that he must possess. What he does to do so will surely chill the reader. Jean-Baptiste eventually maneuvers to get himself apprenticed to a perfumer, so that he can have the opportunity to learn the trade and create scents. He leads a bleak existence, subsisting as little more than a slave to the perfumer for whom he works. The second part of the book begins when Jean-Baptiste leave his employer and goes on a personal pilgrimage, leading an austere existence away from civilization for many years. There, he withdraws into himself even further, living a totally self-sustaining, hermitic existence. He ultimately realizes what other have sensed about him. Jean-Baptiste has no personal scent. He simply does not smell. With this knowledge, he returns to civilization where, having lived as practically an animal for many years, he creates a fictitious and adventurous scenario to account for his filthy and disgusting appearance. Subsequently, he is taken under the wing of some local nobility and feted and pampered. Realizing the importance of scent, he creates a personal scent for himself. He now realizes that he who has the power over scent can rule supreme. He intends to do so. The third part of the book has Jean-Baptiste migrating to a town that is the hub for the scent trade. Perfumes, oils, and soaps are the stock in trade for this town and, as such, beckon brightly to Jean-Baptiste. Once there, he again smells a scent so delectable that he longs to possess it. He knows that scent for what it is and now knows that it is the scent, and not the personal charms of its bearer, that captures the attention and devotion of others. Jean Baptiste wants to harness that scent at all costs. He desperately desires the power to make others love him. He wants to be supreme. It is his desperate desire to harness and possess that celestial scent that causes Jean-Baptiste, a socio-path with little empathy for others, to prey upon the maidens of the town in order to obtain that which he needs. It is his obsession that lays at the heart of the vortex that arises in the town, as murder after murder occurs. Yet, no one suspects him. What ultimately happens leads to an almost unbelievable climax, when Jean-Baptiste finds himself consumed by the passion he has managed to arouse in others through scent. This is a heady, quirky, and compelling debut novel, like nothing I have ever before read. Complex and lyrical in its telling, it is a novel that stays with the reader long after the last page is turned. Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Does to your nose what Beethoven does to your ears
Review: I must have ordered this book on twenty separate occasions for very diverse people. That is because, quite simply, everyone should read this extraordinary novel. It illuminates vividly, brilliantly, so many things---things that will never be the same for this reader: empathy, pity, beauty, self-disgust, and fear among them, but most miraculously of all it teaches you, again, how to use your fifth sense.
Rating:
Summary: Great book that teaches you more than one thing
Review: This books tells the story of the life of a man who struggles to find peace with himself and who discovers who he his and what he wants through out his existence. What I find special about this novel is that it shows people how, what for some people is good, for some other people is bad. It shows that "evil" itself doesnt exist, its just that people have different views of life that come to contrast with the views of other people. It teaches you that to judge somebody you first have to understand his point of view. Thats what this novel does, it makes you understand the point of view of a murderer.
Rating:
Summary: A book of the strangest point of view.
Review: Aside from the fact that this is the story of a murderer from his point of view, the book describes almost everything by scent alone. The festering, putrid descriptions of Paris are enough to make the reader cringe in a way that a visual description never could. You find yourself sniffing a little bit more and wondering, could such a thing have been possible? Could something as offhand as smell really control people so much? I can only tell you, as silly as it may sound, that I put a great deal more stock into my perfumes.
| 
