SOURCE: Schwarz, Robert. Review of Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders, by Patrick Süskind. World Literature Today 59, no. 4 (autumn 1985): 587.

In the following review, Schwarz summarizes the plot and themes of Das Parfum, comparing the novel to the works of Günter Grass and Marcel Proust.

In eighteenth-century Paris the illegitimate urchin Grenouille, endowed with a spectacular sense of smell, hires himself to a rich perfume maker [in Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders]. His innate genius at identifying and creating fragrances from memory would make him famous, but he cares nothing for riches or prestige. His is the kind of inborn genius which feeds on itself, not unlike Mozart's music or Rembrandt's painting. His self-contained, misanthropically self-sufficient, and totally introverted personality, devoid of all feelings and morality, always at war with the world, makes Oskar in The Tin Drum seem a normal, gregarious lad by...