SOURCE: Brunskill, Ian. “Seeing the Unseeing.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4474 (30 December 1988-5 January 1989): 1448.

In the following review, Brunskill compares and contrasts The Pigeon with Das Parfum, focusing on the protagonists, themes, and styles.

In The Parable of the Blind, Gert Hofmann uses the collective voice of the blind beggars in Brueghel's painting of the same title to question man's ability to make sense of the world. The beggars confront the problem in its most literal form. Lacking the comfort of familiar images against which to organize experience, they can know the world only by interrogating each new moment, dependent for their answers on the honesty of their fellow men and the power of their own imaginations. Forced to construct a fantasy of a world they cannot see, they have mythologized even their own history. They go on simply in order not to stop.

The novel follows them through...