Perfume - The Story of a Murderer: A Review

I had picked up Perfume by Patrick Suskind a while ago, I can't remember why now. Maybe because it was an International Bestseller or perhaps had read a recommendation of it somewhere. But I never got around to reading it, which happens often to me when I buy books, hence my wobbling tower of TBR books. But since the movie was coming out soon and I thought I'd be going to France (which I ended up not doing) I brought it with me to Europe. I didn't finish it until I got home and it felt like it took me forever to get through it.

Perfume is, as the title indicates, a story of a murderer. A different kind of murderer, a monster who has no smell of his own but can smell with amazing clarity. And so we go through the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who more then once almost perished, but somehow survived. The book moved extremely slow for me, I wasn't all that interested in Jean-Baptiste or his incredible nose. I felt like I kept waiting for the intriguing climax, the thrilling tension that you feel when you read murder novels. It never came. It almost came, when Grenouille went after his final victim, but then it putzed out rather quickly and got boring again. I wanted some intelligent detective or man to try to figure out Grenouille, to sort of "battle" with him intellectually like in most murder stories and we almost had him, but then he putzed out as well and was a huge disappointment. And the huge orgy... don't even get me started on that. Yeah, now you're going to read the book just to find out what that's all about. I know your dirty mind!

Overall, the book wasn't suspenseful, I didn't care about any of the characters, the plot was slow going and there was no gripping ending or really much in the book that interested me. Perhaps some of the writing got lost in the translation from German to English, I'm not sure, but the writing was average, nothing special, nothing awful. I can honestly see the movie being more dark and gripping then the book and I might go see it just to see what they did with it. Plus, if they do the orgy scene in the movie then it'd totally be worth seeing it. Oh yeah, I got the same dirty mind.

So, overall, read it if you want to read a crazy orgy scene, otherwise, just watch the movie and cross your fingers the orgy scene is in it. I'll let you all know if I watch the movie and what I think. And if the orgy scene is in it. Do I seem fixated on the orgy scene or something? Probably because that was the only slightly intriguing part of the book, and really, it was pretty stupid, but kind of funny.

2*