Another victory for books that have a painting in their cover!
Perfume is a book that is like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Love in the Time of Cholera, in the sense that it takes its parent genre and then thwacks it on the back of the head until it dies like it’s Grenouille when he wants to extract the smell from a puppy. I got this book for my birthday, and my mom said, when she first received the copy, “Hey, we didn’t order this.” She was there when we ordered it off of eBay. I don’t blame her for reacting that way. From the cover (of my particular version), this looks to be a pointlessly provocative and gratuitously violent murder novel bestseller. It is a murder novel, yes, but probably the furthest from what I’d ever expect from the genre. Perfume is… crazy. For a book that on the surface appears to be, well, just a plain-old story about, like, a murderer or something. But it is truly one of the strangest books to ever fit in that genre of writing. It’s, like the aforementioned Love in the Time of Cholera and Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book riddled with philosophical tangents, featuring an odd, free-flowing story. The execution scene as an allegory for how we treat the wealthy/beautiful is pretty effective. Which is all to say, Perfume is a strange, thematically rich book that you should definitely pick up if you’re into thought provoking literary fiction.
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