Terrier, in turn, hands the child over to Madame Gaillard, an emotionless woman who runs a house, for payment, for the abandoned like Grenouille, and there he stays for several years. Father Terrier, a monk of Saint-Merri, takes possession of him after a succession of wet nurses reject him for his greediness, and the last of these declares a repulsion because Grenouille has no smell, as other babies do.

In due course, his mother is executed because she attempts to kill the infant, and Grenouille’s itinerant journey begins. His mother is scaling and gutting fish and Grenouille is born there as she does this, under the fish stall. Woods originally published as Das Parfum by Diogenes Verlag AG, 1985) begins in Paris in 1738, where Grenouille is born in the rue aux Fers, near to the ‘fiendish stench’ of the Cimetière des Innocents. Perfume (Penguin Books, 1987, translated from the original German by John E. However, credulity is somewhat stretched as the reader is constantly asked to believe, for example, that Grenouille can discern the scent of a particular person in a crowded city, amongst hundreds of thousands of others, at some distance and in amongst the multitude of other scents of a pungent 18th century scene.

That this is a fantasy of almost supernatural olfactory perception (though grounded in a character at once extraordinarily gifted but not so blessed) is, for the most part, accepted. The story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a fantastical affair, in essence, blended with a low macabre tone, which takes a shift to queasiness towards its latter pages, and descends into a scene of farce before rounding back to the low macabre again.

Perfume suskind review