Secondly, Patrick Suskind emphasizes the sense of smell by using variety of things to describe and compare the smell. He did this in detailed. For example, “The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat…” “ People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions…” “ And their heads, up on the top, at the back of the head, where their hair makes a cowlick… is where they smell best of all. It smells like caramel…” By writing these, readers will be able to imagine what the smell is actually like because the things he uses to describe are from real life. It makes readers get more involved and attracted to the story. Patrick Suskind not only uses vocabulary to build up the atmosphere but also makes readers feel that they can smell the actual smell that he is describing. If Patrick Suskind didn’t compare the smell to different things, readers will not be able to understand and imagine the smell and the book will not be a success.
Thirdly, Patrick Suskind gives detailed description of the places he is describing. For example, “And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of particular fiendish stench…the Cimetiere des Innocents to be exact. For eight hundred years the dead had been brought here from the Hotel-Dieu and from the surrounding parish churches…” “Grenouille’s mother was standing at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she has just gutted. The fish. Ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell masked the odour of corpses.” Patrick Suskind describes this in detailed to give reader a clear impression including the smell, the action, the scene etc. By doing this, readers’ mind will have a rough picture the places. This makes readers get to know and feel they are close to the story which Patrick Suskind is writing.
From the novel's onset, Suskind ushers his audience, through the use of very vivid detail, to the bowels of the netherworld where evil incarnate, Grenouille, waits to emerge. The gruesome description of Grenouille's birth and separation from his amoral mother by a knife forebodes the manifestation of extremely unpleasant future events. Later on, Grenouille was given away to Father Terrier, then to Madam Gaillard because he doesn’t smell like a normal baby would smell. This seems to relate to the title of the book “Perfume”. Patrick Suskind writes the part of why the baby was passing to other people in detailed, because he want to emphasize the sense of smell. When Father Terrier first got Grenouille, he thinks that the baby is pleasant, but when Grenouille wakes up, “it seemed to Terrier As if the child saw him with his nostrils, as if it were staring intently at him…as if it were using its nose to devour something whole, something that came from him, from Terrier…” The baby’s sense of smell is very strong, and Patrick Suskind describes this in detailed
In conclusion, the sense of smell which Patrick Suskind emphasizes is an important clue of this novel. Suskind's revolting visual imagery captures the olfactory sense of the reader thus dragging him into the fictitious world of hideous stench. Once inside this malodorous hell, Suskind panders to the readers' baser instincts through the novel's protagonist, Jean Baptiste Grenouille.
