The Perfume Novel.. A Novel School Closed Forever

In this month of 1985, Diogenes Verlag, a Swiss publishing house that was obscure at the time and based in Zurich, announced the publication of a novel entitled (Perfume.. The Story of a Murderer) by a young German writer at the age of thirty-six. The publisher's word on the cover of the modest first edition stated that he is *a German writer from Munich, and that he is a promising novelist who enjoys a sense, maturity, and superior ability and mastery of his tools with a rare talent for weaving the narrative fabric smoothly and deeply, and that his style is not devoid of enjoyable police suspense despite it being his first novel*.

But one of the major critics was not enthusiastic about the novel, whether in Switzerland, where it was published, or in Germany; It was displayed in many major libraries, and the novel was initially received with extreme coldness, and only some obscure journalists of the second and third ranks wrote about it in limited literary forums. Perhaps this was due to the lukewarm relations and fierce competition between the event makers in both countries; the major German critics usually deal with great caution with any creative publication in the German language that is not published in Germany first, and the major critics in Switzerland, in contrast, were more wary of German writers; due to historical circumstances deeply rooted in the conscience of the Swiss people since the mid-thirties and even before the outbreak of World War II with the beginning of the dominance of Nazi propaganda trumpets and the recruitment of German writers to serve the old Aryan dream through the might of the Nazi propaganda machine.

But perhaps also because of Patrick Süskind's introverted nature. He always seems to be arrogant and stubborn, and does not accept press interviews at all, but rather strongly detests them, and rejects the spotlight, advertising, and invitations from radio and television platforms with a strong and decisive force that does not accept argument, and absolutely and categorically refuses to agree to be nominated for any literary award, regardless of its source or value, whether local or foreign. He is content with daily drinking in a small, idle bar in the "Shabbing" district of Munich, his city, maintaining a strict and precise system for scheduling his appointments. He sits at his table every day starting at five in the evening, and leaves by taxi at one or two in the morning on the weekends. During this period, he sits silently, staring at the table or the ashtray, neither reading nor writing, and responding only with a nod of his head or hands and the contraction or relaxation of the muscles of his face, expressing approval or rejection.

Such a nature would of course disturb and alienate enthusiastic journalists, critics and brokers involved in the media machine and who believe in it with all faith and conviction. In Germany, the world's economic capital, everything is a commodity that must be marketed. Literature is no exception, of course. In fact, the returns on marketing culture and literature in Germany rank third, right after the returns on the arsenal of war machines, mechanics, massive technology and the whimsical production that giant companies and institutions are recruited for; to manufacture alcoholic beverages, tobacco, betting (gambling) and entertainment games.

But only a year later, the famous German magazine (Spiegel-Mirror) published a critical article that celebrated the novel with great enthusiasm, and announced that the young creative novelist (Patrick Süskind) is the legitimate creative heir to the giants of German narrative, and stated that he is no less talented than the great "Heinrich Böll", the troublemaker "Martin Walser", the seasoned leftist "Günter Grass" and others. Not even three years had passed until the novel (Perfume) was at the forefront of most libraries and cinemas in the world after it was translated into more than forty-seven languages, and more than sixteen million copies were sold, and its success later extended to the big screens and Hollywood through a film that embodied its events, directed by the German "Tom Tykwer" in 2006 AD, and "Süskind" received an amount of ten million euros tax-free in exchange for signing the contract and agreeing to convert his only orphan novel into a film.

The novel takes place in the 18th century in Paris, Auvergne, Montpellier, and Grasse. It tells the story of the serial killer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a strange, complex, and fictional character from the underworld of Paris. The novel follows the development of his life from the unfortunate moment of his birth in a popular fish market full of foul odors and filth, where his mother tries to get rid of him immediately after his birth, cutting his navel with a dirty knife and throwing him in a pile of garbage and fish remains; before they notice her and she is immediately executed. This being the fourth time she had gotten rid of an illegitimate child, the narrator continues to narrate the events of the growth of this cursed child whom all wet nurses refused to accept until he reached the wet nurse and governess "Madame Gaillard", the cruel, rude monster, then his early youth and his work in the tanneries with the tanner "Grimal", and his later move to work for "Baldini", the best perfume maker and seller in Paris who had reached old age, lost his sense of smell and was almost bankrupt before he noticed this miracle boy who possessed a developed and superhuman sense of smell.

The illiterate, self-made young man, Grenouille, succeeds in making and recomposing a mixture of exquisite perfumes with extremely complex chemical compositions before learning the basic principles of concentrating perfume. He succeeds in doing so in a legendary way, which makes customers flock to him. However, that is not enough for him. He wants to achieve perfection in his craft, and seeks to make a perfume above the earth. So he abandons people and chooses a cave to seclude himself in for seven whole years, during which he does not see anyone. After emerging from his isolation, he decides to do something dangerous, which is to distill the greatest perfume known to humanity from the scent of captivating women. Thus begins his life as a serial killer who causes extreme terror wherever he goes. The most beautiful virgin girls begin to disappear one after the other. He kills them, cuts their hair, and tears their clothes, without physically touching them. He throws them back into the street as lifeless, naked corpses after smearing them with a special ointment to absorb it with their scents and to collect the basic ingredients for making the concentrated perfume from twelve main raw materials.

After the disappearance of the twenty-fifth girl, he is arrested and confesses without understanding why they are upset with him, as he did not realize the dividing line between good and evil, but believed, until the last moment, that he was doing a noble deed for their benefit, and he believed throughout the investigation and imprisonment that they were fools who did not understand the nobility and sublimity of his goal. Moments before his execution, he sprays in the air, and around the execution platform, a single drop of the perfume he extracted from the victims; the uproar rises, and the people understand the truth as he sees it; they demand his release because he is innocent and not guilty, then everyone is suddenly struck with a strange state of infatuation, love, serenity, lust, and the desire to embrace and have sex, and they engage in a group sex scene in which everyone participates, each embracing the other, without regard to kinship, social class, beauty, ugliness, or gender. Each embraces whoever happens to be next to him, whoever he is, and "Grenouille" seizes the opportunity of their immersion in this group embrace; to leave them and return to Paris. When he arrives at his birthplace, he pours the entire bottle of the amazing perfume on his clothes. The crowds and common people rush to him, devour his flesh and eat it in minutes, out of extreme love and infatuation with his enchanting scent.

These are the events of the novel in brief, but the puzzling question remains, of course: What made this novel itself turn into a legend in the world of literature, and what distinguished it so that critics and ordinary readers alike consider it one of the greatest novels in history? The answer is certainly not simple. This is because it actually happened and we often intersect in literature with confusing phenomena for which critics have not found, and will not find, a reasonable and convincing explanation; a novel like Nabokov's "Lolita" was supposed to achieve a miserable failure and not spread, especially since it undermines the convictions, principles and entire moral foundations on which the contemporary literary novel relied as one of the tributaries of influence, reform and correction and played the role of the guide and public conscience. However, despite the fact that it overthrew all values ​​and constants, it succeeded legendary success despite the simplicity of its language, and despite the fact that it does not technically even rise to the level of "average". However, despite this, and even after all these decades, it still tops the list of best-selling and most influential novels in world literature.

The same goes for Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita", which was first published twenty-seven years after the death of its author, as it should not have spread so widely in the Soviet Union and Russia in particular. Russia, which chewed and regurgitated whatever was available and permitted of peaceful literature that contributed to the development of the principles of obedience, contentment, order, arrangement, and the sanctification of duty and teachings, but the novel "The Master and Margarita" struck all of that and what the reader was accustomed to against the wall, so the devil who stirs up chaos, confuses the city, scatters everything, and destroys convictions with whims, childishness, and frivolity was the novel's charge and charm. So what made it spread in such a strange way, even though it is, unlike Naubakov's novel, a technically solid and modern novel for its time, but it is not a popular novel for the general public, and it was not suitable for the Russian people in particular, neither when it was written in 1940 AD, nor when it was first published in 1967 AD?

I think the answer lies simply in what these three effects have in common: novelty, non-cloning, and leaving the herd and plowing virgin land, or what I call (planting a royal banner in unowned land). However, it must also be acknowledged that the extraordinary phenomena of creativity do not leave the same effects even if they share the same fortunes; If Naubakov, with his scandalous novel Lolita, succeeded in opening a new path in writing, and established a school of which he is the master, and produced for us great students in writing erotic novels, and if Bulgakov paved the way for great students such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amin Maalouf, and dozens of great international novelists when he opened the door wide open to what would be called decades later the magical realist novel, and the historical fantasy novel of the Platonic (in reference to Plato the Platonic, the ruler of Jerusalem who crucified Christ), then Patrick Suskind remains among them all a sterile individual creative phenomenon, and his school will stop with him after his death. No one can walk in the tracks and traces of his footsteps; This is because he covered almost everything that the sense of smell can bear as a creative sense that drives all the events of the novel, and he succeeded in that in a way that is not only difficult to imitate, but perhaps it is unfortunate to say that it is a theme that has been preserved and closed, and officially registered forever in the name of the German writer "Patrick Suskind", the introverted, lazy person who writes almost as if he is amending his will and it will not develop after him. The truth, and frankly, is that he does not need to write another novel. Nor to convince us again that he is a genius and immortal writer whose name cannot be erased despite his personal insistence on not publishing his drawing. Perhaps we should be satisfied with what he has provided us with in this untrodden approach.

• Süskind, a contemporary German writer who has published many literary works that varied between short stories and novels. He has one one-act play entitled “The Double Bass Player” which was first published in 1981 and is considered the most performed German play in the history of German-speaking theatre. His productions have multiplied after publishing the novel “Perfume”

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