The wonderful experience of reading a book with your nose

Recently, browsing through the shelves of my bedside library, I discovered a book that surprised me as a book had not surprised me for a long time. I must admit that I noticed him because of his film adaptation directed by Tom Tykwer. Something that does not usually happen to me but that, this time, allowed me to meet what in my opinion is one of the most surprising novels of the twentieth century.

"Perfume" is one of those films that when viewed leaves no one indifferent due to a plot and a shocking image. Something that, after seeing it, I kept in my mind for a long time and that woke up, like a forgotten fragrance, when feeling on the shelf the presence of the little book with the "enigmatic" same title.

Logically I could not resist taking it, but not before being ashamed of my absolute ignorance when not having realized until that moment that the origin of the plot of that movie that had so impacted me was originally from a book that I was completely unaware of.

Once I read it, I realized a situation that happened to me while I was enjoying the novel that had never happened to me and that undoubtedly characterized this work as genuine. The author, Patrick Süskind, was able when he wrote this story in the 80s to do something that very few writers can do..

"The perfume", in this way, is not different because of its plot but because of how it is presented to us and how the events that take place are described. Unlike other books, in this case,  the reader knows the story through the sense of smell. The description of the space is made olfactory and the characters and environments are known by their smell and not by their physiognomy. Physics.

Therefore, while reading, one is contextualizing by the different smells described everything that is happening. Moving like this, to the eighteenth century through a new meaning and through the sensations that emanate from it. The smell becomes, in this way, the fundamental axis of everything, basic to understand the evolution of the argument.

A masterful literary device devised by Süskind that presents it to us through the main character of the novel, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. A female killer with a supernatural ability to catch scent. A unique and different noir, historical and horror novel that engages the reader through a cloud of real smells of all kinds.

It is really fascinating that this Best seller Published in 1985 it was the first novel written by the German novelist. An extraordinary way, available to very few, to start a career as a writer.

With this I say goodbye not without first reminding you of a quote written by Claudio Magris in which he states that: "A true literary critic is a detective, and it is possible that the fascination of this indisputable activity does not consist in the sophisticated interpretations, but in the smell of a hound that leads to a drawer, to a library, to the secret of life"

Surely, as Magris affirms, it was smell that led me to find and discover this wonderful novel amidst a sea of ​​books and sensations.