Category Archives: Reading

Popular Penguins

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*Archived from October 2008*

Time has pretty much become meaningless in my new world on the other side of the planet.  Minutes stretch into hours, which stretch into days, which stretch into months … There is no real point in worrying about how long I will be in Australia.  I’m here and that’s the most important part.

So please don’t hold me to it, but I think it was about 3 weeks ago when I met up with My Flattie and we did 4 km of walking in the sand on Bondi Beach.  A couple days later, just in time for my newly painful shin splints to put a significant damper on my catwalk, I decided, in complete stupidity, to walk the 2 km from school to the train station because ya know … it’s FUN for every step to hurt.

Halfway to the station I decided it was time for a little detour.  My backpack was making me sweat (eew gross!) and my shins had begun screaming at me umm … right … moving on…

What I meant to say is a bookstore, with a golden halo hovering delightfully along the perimeter, called out my name. “Daisy! Daisy! You MUST visit me.”  Who am I to decline an offer from an angel?

And that’s when I discovered “Popular Penguins.”  And a light shone down from the heavens like “aaahhhh” and … hey listen – I told you in the last post I’m going crazy.

Ok so for real though – yo – I’m totally digging the “Popular Penguins.”  And as much as I joke about divine intervention … I do believe that life has a funny way of teaching you things. I will write more about it later but “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton was one of the books I bought that day at the bookstore and I have learned a LOT from it.  It’s fascinating and it is actually helping me cope with life so far away from home. I would have never discovered, read or bought the book if it were not for the joyous Popular Penguins – classic books at affordable prices.  And I would have never discovered the Popular Penguins if my brother hadn’t given me the heavy duty backpack, or if I hadn’t met up with My Flattie a few days before…

I think that’s pretty cool.

So to share with you one of the things I’ve recently learned from my new book, I present to you a quote from the great philosopher Schopenhauer:

Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

Oh yeah.  That’s right.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Review, Quotes and GROSS

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*Archived from January 2009 with follow-up post and comments included.*

Has a book ever left you a little stumped?  Like WHY IN THE WORLD WAS THIS BOOK CALLED A CLASSIC??  I wrote a post about “Popular Penguins” awhile back.  I LUV Popular Penguins (Classic Books in Australia) and I think I even said it was fate that I found these books.  I’m not prepared to rescind my dramatic exclamation; however, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer???  Are you serious?  Seriously?  That?  A classic?

Oh boy.

The book was GROSS!  GROSS!  And GROSS!  Like the part where he murdered 25 girls so he could wrap their body in linens to capture their smell.  Then when he was arrested the raging mob turned into a mass orgy, and instead of crucifying him and breaking the 12 major joints of his body, they worshiped him because using the perfume from his victims he created a perfume that made him smell like a God.  WHAT?  Or how about the end when this same perfume that made others worship him turned a crowd of normal people into cannibals and they ate him?  And they didn’t feel guilty for eating a HUMAN?

Out of the 263 pages that I read I liked three parts and they were at the very end.  Here they are:

 

Quotes from Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind.

  • What he had always longed for – that other people should love him – became at the moment of its achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them.  And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred – in hating and being hated.
  • He could do all that, [rule the world] if only he wanted to.  He possessed the power.  He held it in his hand.  A power stronger than the power of money or the power of terror or the power of death:  the invincible power to command the love of mankind.  There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself.  And though his perfume might allow him to appear before the world as a god – if he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell with it, with the world, with himself, with his perfume.
  • No one knows how good this perfume really is, he thought.  No one knows how well made it is.  Other people are merely conquered by its effect, don’t even know that it’s a perfume that’s working on them, enslaving them.  The only one who has ever recognized it for its true beauty is me, because I created it myself.  And at the same time, I’m the only one that it cannot enslave.  I am the only person for whom it is meaningless.

ORIGINAL comments – and follow up post:

Emily says:

I was a little put off by the book as well. I must say, it isn’t your typical happy ending story. However I must say, I think you haven’t quite reviewed the deeper implications of the novel.
Admittedly, Grenouille is a “tick-like” disgusting protagonist, however, if you look deeper, it is neccessary for him to be this way.
The novel reveals a great deal about the drive behind human beings’ behavioral actions and the basic human behaviors we all try so desperately to cover up. It also reveals a great deal about the irony of “modern society” and the “modern way of thinking”

The huge orgy at the end, is what really stuck out to me as showing me the underlying driving force behind human desire. The book implies we rely a great deal on scent, even if we don’t pay attention to it. The scent overcomes the 10,000 gathered spectators and suddenly they are all driven to passion, all because of scent. It also shos the extreme maliability of the masses.

It also was a ironic how “everyone was guilty” so they all just covered it up, and moved on. To me this showed how people, more pregressively have become obsessed with covering up the more “shameful” natural instincts we ALL have.

Another huge thing I found that held deeper implications was the way in which the masses reacted to their inability to blame someone for the deaths of all the virgins. Because they had no culprit, and the church failed to prevent the killings people all turned to a “higher power” Ironically the more simple minded folk stuck with the church, those more advanced middle class thinkers turned to Acience, and the upperclass thinkers all turned to worshiping the devil. Ironic isn’t it? Human beings need a higher power to look up to because when we don’t get explinations we suddenly feel a desire to look to a “higher power” (its hard for me to get across what im trying to say)
The novel reveals a great deal about chaos vs structure, old ways versus progressive thinking, peoples dependence on a higher power, the underlying animalistic instincts of humans,the irony of modern society, and a very dictinct and unique view of love.

mostly, it really emphasizes the ambiguity of morality. Is grenouille really doing a terrible thing? or is he simply trying to revolutionize the world of scent? It can be argued he is actually bettering the worl by releiving us of our own self concious control. is he truely as evil as he claim to be throughout the whole novel?

oh and at the end when they all devour him out of love, its especially ironic since they arent “normal” people they are the worst criminals in all of paris in which every action has always been based on hate and evil. Yet the worst act they could ever commit is simply out of love….ironic much? and yeah ill admit, strange, and very weird, but it had to be that way.

sorry for wrting so much. i thought however you might be interested in the little bit of deeper meaning behind this rather strange and disguting novel. I love it.

  • Daisy says:

    No need to apologize!!! I was and AM interested. You are absolutely right in a deeper meaning being present. I guess I didn’t really look because I was too put off by the whole thing. It’s interesting because as you mentioned the people were always searching for a higher meaning, an explanation – they needed that. And ironically it kind of seems to me that you would also have to have an inner drive for answers and reasons to delve deep enough to understand the point behind this book – for most people that is. It sounds like you understood it the whole time – so kudos to you!! But for the rest of us – or at least for me – the only way I would have looked deeper into this is if I wanted answers or meaning for the book. Instead I just chalked it up as … well … a little demented and then I looked the other way…

    This is a good example that there can be meaning in beauty or revulsion – you just have to open your eyes and see it. Something I failed to do with this book.

    Thank you for sharing!! I really do appreciate it. :)

    • Marilyn says:

      Well, I actually loved the film, and the beginning of the book. Obviously it’s a bit disgusting that he murdered these 25 women, but if you dig deeper as Emily said it makes sense. His scent is the reason he survived. Now, put yourself in his place, you’re in deep misery, you didn’t receive any love from no one, young children tried to kill you couple of times, and then, the scent of a woman hits you. It’s beautiful, it’s his own ‘happy place’. In all the misery France was in the eighteenth century, he managed to be happy. I’m pretty sure a lot of people didn’t manage to find happiness but he did. And I kind of think that’s beautiful. But then there are other opinions. You have to be careful how you read a book, careful not to be too bias. Süsking prepares the readers to all this disgustingness by making the setting dreadful.
      I am currently studying this book in class, and I think it’s very interesting compared to other books that are dead boring. (The outsider)

      PS. sorry if this comment was posted twice, pbm with my computer

  • Lexii says:

    i totally agree with you about the novel, but unlike you i was not put off by the protagonist, he lead me to read on. i think what you were trying to say about the higher power is that society needs to have someone or something to turn to when there is something they can not explain or get an explanation out of. overly i think that you got the meaning of what the novel was actually about, not just about a murderer.
    (:

FOLLOW UP POST:

SNAP!  Holy WOW.  Ok so a long time ago I blah blah blahed about how I HATED the book Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – it was GROSS and completely demented.  Well today I got a comment about the book.  I just want to say THANK YOU to Emily because she was so polite and thoughtful as she pointed out how I completely missed the entire point of the book.  [lol and sheepish look as I am quite embarrassed by this.]

Umm … yeah …  I still think the book is gross, gross and more gross.  I still am put off by the graphic ending and think the author could have probably made his point without having a dude with no smell kill off 25 fictional girls, leaving their fictional families understandably traumatized – BUT – I can now see how the book took a look at society as a whole.  People tend to minimalize even the most atrocious of deeds if they themselves played any part in them and when similar atrocious deeds are committed without a suspect they victimize and criminalize innocent parties.

And a whole bunch of other stuff that I WOULD explain but honestly I have a headache and can’t be bothered to recap so if you are THAT interested in the book you can read the comment linked above OR maybe I’ll do a REAL analysis of the book in the future.