25 August 2009
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
One of my favorite passages in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, and just about the best description of a ghost that’s not a literal ghost.
Penguin paperback edition, pp. 194-195:
Grenouille garnered his first individual odour in this Hôpital de la Charité. He managed to pilfer sheets that were supposed to be burned because the journeyman sackmaker who had lain wrapped in them for two months had just died of consumption. The cloth was so drenched in the exudations of the sackmaker that it had absorbed them like an enfleurage paste and could be directly subjected to lavage. The result was eerie: right under Grenouille’s nose, the sackmaker rose olfactorily from the dead, ascending from the alcohol solution, hovering there — the phantom slightly distorted by the peculiar methods of reproduction and the countless miasmas of his disease — but perfectly recognizable in space as an olfactory personage. A small man of about thirty, blond, with a bulbous nose, short limbs, flat, cheesy feet, swollen genitalia, choleric temperament and a stale mouth odour — not a handsome man, aromatically speaking, this sackmaker, not worth being held on to for any length of time, like the puppy. And yet for one whole night Grenouille let the scent-spectre flutter about his cabin while he sniffed at him again and again, happy and deeply satisfied with the sense of power that he had won over the aura of another human being. He poured it away the next day.
