The perfume: The story of a killer

Author's name: Patrick Zuskind Publisher: Dar Al-Mada for Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2021 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: In the eighteenth century, in France, there lived a man who belonged to the most talented and heinous creatures of that era. And that era would not lack such creatures. And the story of this man is what we will tell here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. And if his name has now been forgotten, contrary to the names of other notorious geniuses, such as Duhamel, Saint-Jost, Fouché, or Bonaparte and others, that is certainly not because Grenouille, in comparison with these more famous men, was less lofty and contemptuous of humans and immoral, in short, blasphemous; but because his genius and ambition were confined to a realm that leaves no trace in history, that is, in the kingdom of fleeting scents. In the era we are talking about, the cities were dominated by a foul smell that no modern person can imagine the extent of its hatred. The streets were oozing with the smell of feces, the backyards of houses with the smell of urine, the staircases of buildings with the smell of decayed wood and rat droppings, and the kitchens with the smell of rotten cabbage and mutton fat; while unventilated rooms exuded the smell of damp dust, bedrooms with the smell of greasy sheets and damp feather beds stuffed with feathers, and the pungent odor emanating from chamber pots. From the fireplaces, the smell of sulfur wafted; from tanneries, the smell of caustic washing alkalis; from slaughterhouses, the smell of putrefying blood. As for people, they radiated the smell of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths, the smell of rotten teeth; from their stomachs, the smell of onions; and if they had aged a little, their bodies had the smell of old cheese, sour milk, and malignant diseases.