Today I wanted to talk about the international bestseller of Patrick Süskind, The Perfume. I could easily try being an outsider by talking about his other writings, including The Pigeon, the Double Bass and On Love and Death, which were equally captivating and which I read with great pleasure. What to say about The Perfume then? Everything about this book has been said. One can smell the things depicted through the pages, the anti-hero is a fascinating and yet hateful character...
But what I kept in mind, after the first reading, was a total different aspect; ever since I was a child, I have been really, really scared of one thing. Ticks. I got bitten twice, and yet not infected. Then, later, as I got a cat, I met them again. I should have been scared of them as a child, not as an adult. But in between, Patrick Süskind's words had entered my mind and lodged there ever since. Talk about the power of words, I haven't walked a single day in the forest or in a green patch without thinking about the way he constantly compares his murderer hero to this dreadful insect. What's fascinating there is that he depicts evil, and he does so with the only insect that might not find any defender for its cause. And he does so with great success, since ever since I've read his lines, I never found anything I would be more afraid of. Up to this day, when I had to battle a colony of ticks gathered in grapes. Once again, I thought about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Except that this time it was just to laugh at it, thinking that next time I'll go have a walk in the forest I probably wouldn't bother much about a single little tick, after having had to deal with so many.
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