SOURCE: Baumgarten, Ruth. “Sugar and Spice.” New Statesman 112, no. 2896 (26 September 1986): 34.

In the following review, Baumgarten evaluates the metaphorical use of the sense of smell in Perfume.

Patrick Süskind's first novel [Perfume] comes here accompanied by the full blast of its publisher's fanfares. These announce it as the new Umberto Eco, a ‘serious’ (continental) historical novel meeting equally with critical rapture and middle-brow mass appeal. In the year since its domestic publication it hasn't budged once from the German bestseller chart.

But where the appeal of Eco's Name of the Rose lay in its complex twisting of detective plot with theological and political debates and history lessons, Süskind's novel looks more like an attempt to flesh a pun out into an allegory. In German, the expression ‘I can't smell x’ is common parlance for disliking somebody. Süskind's novel charts the progress of the fictional, French, 18th-century...