SOURCE: Parkes, Stuart. “The Novels of Patrick Süskind: A Phenomenon of the 1980s.” In Literature on the Threshold: The German Novel in the 1980s, edited by Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Roland Smith, pp. 309-19. New York: Berg, 1990.

In the following essay, Parkes provides a thematic overview of Das Parfum, Die Taube, and Der Kontrabaß, contrasting their purpose and style with the general characteristics of the postmodern German novel.

In his introduction to The Name of the Rose dated 5 January 1980, Umberto Eco compares the intellectual climate of that time with the atmosphere of ten years earlier. He no longer sees ‘a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world.’ It is now possible for ‘the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) … [to] write out of pure love of writing’.¹

It may well be...