Perfume

When I read Crash last year, I wasn’t prepared for a book grounded in monomania and a lot of what makes it good sailed over my head. No so with Perfume.

Perfume is the story of a little smell goblin called Grenouille born with a preternaturally sensitive nose and his quest to create perfumes so exquisite that they transcend smell and start to verge on mind control. To this end he sinks to some pretty shocking levels of depravity.

Perfume is fun. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s immensely sensual and plot bounces along at a quick clip, Grenouille moving from one master to another as he learns and grows and slowly works towards his plan of using smells to control people.

But Baldini was not content with these products of classic beauty care. It was his ambition to assemble in his shop everything that had a scent or in some fashion contributed to the production of scent. And so in addition to incense pastilles, incense candles, and cords, there were also sundry spices, from anise seeds to zapota seeds, syrups, cordials, and fruit brandies, wines from Cyprus, Málaga, and Corinth, honeys, coffees, teas, candied and dried fruits, figs, bonbons, chocolates, chestnuts, and even pickled capers, cucumbers, and onions, and marinated tuna. Plus perfumed sealing waxes, stationery, lover’s ink scented with attar of roses, writing kits of Spanish leather, penholders of white sandalwood, caskets and chests of cedarwood, potpourris and bowls for flower petals, brass incense holders, crystal flacons and cruses with stoppers of cut amber, scented gloves, handkerchiefs, sewing cushions filled with mace, and musk-sprinkled wallpaper that could fill a room with scent for more than a century.

The whole book is like this.

Eventually Grenouille abandons humanity and achieves godlike powers via the perfume he's created—but finds this brings him no joy, no satisfaction, only utmost despair. Like I said: fun!