The Rancid Source Of ‘Perfume'

Patrick Süskind's "Perfume" was an enormous international publishing success when it first appeared 21 years ago. Since then, a number of ambitious and accomplished directors have tried to make a film version that would do justice to the reclusive Bavarian author's astonishing feat of imaginative fiction. Now, finally, a film has been made by the relatively young German director of "Run Lola Run," Tom Tykwer.

The most costly production in the history of German cinema, the film, which opens in New York on December 27, features Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, among others. But after more than two decades, it's worth returning to the book, because I have an angular suspicion that its principal metaphor has been completely overlooked or misunderstood. We can better appreciate the rather breathtaking and epic quality of the story once we comprehend the vast spasm of history that may have preoccupied Mr. Süskind from the time of his childhood.

The novel begins in the grisly mess of Paris in its most odorous neighborhood in the late 1700s. The central character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born to a fishwife who has already dispatched four of her newborn babies and tries the same with Grenouille, but botches the job. The infant is rescued, and within several weeks the mother is executed for what she has done. The son is installed into the French orphanage system, with an unpromising future ahead of him. Despite this dramatic handicap, Grenouille somehow turns his life into a turbulent and colorful triumph over circumstances, until he is killed by several bums lurking in the slum of Paris from which he originated.

Grenouille possesses two radical gifts involving smell. First, he has no scent. Even as a babe, it was widely noted that he produced no signature human effluvia. Human beings aren't as exquisitely attentive to scent as dogs and other creatures are. Nonetheless we ceaselessly wash and deodorize our bodies, and we support an international industry in which relatively inexpensive derivatives of flowers and a few other substances are mixed with skill, then marketed with an élan promising sexual attractiveness and upward corporeal mobility.

Second, Grenouille enjoys the power to read and remember scents as if they were words on a page. Though he has absolutely no odor himself, he is obsessed by the vast array of smells in the world. He apprentices to a master parfumeur and soon surpasses him. He murders a passel of young women in order to capture their special tang to use himself as perfume. Because he has no smell of his own he is seemingly immune for an unduly long time from charges of murder. Even more, where he goes crowds follow, as if he were the Pied Piper: "… he could tell people whatever he wanted. … with the first breath they gained confidence in him, for they were inhaling his artificial odor — they believed everything. … they would love him to the point of insanity … merely to be able to smell him, Grenouille."

The story is ever escalating in its extraordinary improbability. Entirely fanciful? No. There is a real-life version of this character, who had to have infected Süskind: Adolf Hitler. Like Grenouille, he had no figurative odor. Despite what monstrous things he said and did, he remained attractive to those around him. He filled cabinet rooms and stadia with countless people who literally worshipped him. Leni Riefenstahl celebrated his magic.

In the novel, even though the citizens of Grasse know for certain that Grenouille is a serial killer, "they were overcome by a powerful sense of goodwill, of tenderness, of crazy, childish infatuation, yes, God help them, of love for this little homicidal man. … he had managed to make the world admire him. To hell with admire! Love him! Desire him! Idolize him!"

The fictional character wanted to create "The incomparable Empire of Grenouille. … he desired that his empire be fragrant. … And Grenouille the Great saw that it was good, very, very good."The real-life dictator was a deadly presence in Bavaria, where Süskind lived as a child and a man — the author was born four years after the war ended in Munich, the city where the Third Reich was born in the cesspool of the Beer Hall Putsch.

This is a stretch — yes, a stretch. But so is the fictional character of Grenouille. So was the real-life figure of Hitler and the millions who inhaled his scent of promise and certainty. So too were the murders of just-blossoming virgins for their scent in Grenouille's France, or the Jews of Hitler's Europe for their genes. Intricate, improbable ideas produced catastrophe, murder in the service of art and mental empire. What coerces the imagination of a writer or perhaps more firmly limits his choice of what is monumental? A conscientious bloodhound would understand.

Mr. Tiger is professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. His most recent book is "The Decline of Males" (1999).