《香水》是德国作家帕特里克·聚斯金德创作的额一部小说，于1985年出版，它构思奇特，寓意深刻，小说《香水》出版前先在《法兰克福总汇报》上连载，立即引起强烈反映，是有史以来最畅销的德文小说。 书中讲述了一个发生在18世纪巴黎的故事，主人公格雷诺耶生在巴黎的一个臭鱼摊子，但天生对香水有着匪夷所思的辨别能力，为了制作香水，他杀害了二十六名少女，以摄取其香味。《香水》写于上世纪80年代，当时现代小说正走入过于观念化、晦涩难懂的死胡同，而《香水》的古典式写法、生动和抓人的情节成了西方小说界的一剂解毒针。《香水》一诞生就引领了新的小说潮流。被人们誉为“20世纪最著名德国小说。人的感官当中，嗅觉的有效范围并不狭窄(比味觉和触觉广，几乎和视觉听觉差不多)，但缺乏交流和沟通。美食当前会兴奋，在公交车里的浓郁女士旁边也会兴奋，除此之外少有嗅觉的激动。《香水》是第一部以气味为主人公的伟大作品。奉为经典的那段：“在我们所说的那个时代，各个城市里始终弥漫着我们现代人难以想象的臭气。……” About the author: Patrick Suskind is a German author and screenwriter. A recluse, he lives inMunich and France. About the storyteller: Dean Clarke is an English teacher in China. He is South African. He speaksin a neutral accent. Parfum by Patrick Süskind "The Name of the Rose, the last literary sensation from Europe, crept up on America by stealth.PERFUME... arrives with fanfare... PERFUME GIVES OFF A RARE, SINFULLY ADDICTIVE CHILL OFPURE EVIL. SUSKIND HAS SEDUCTIVE POWER AS A STORYTELLER." --Connoisseur "PERFUME IS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING DISCOVERIES IN YEARS... A SUPREMELYACCOMPLISHED WORK OF ART, MARVELLOUSLY GRAFTED AND ENJOYABLE, AND RICH INHISTORICAL DETAIL, WITH AN ABUNDANCE OF LIFE... AN ASTONISHING PERFORMANCE, AMASTERWORK OF ARTISTIC CONCEPTION AND EXECUTION... CONSTANTLY FASCINATING...WITH HIS VERY FIRST NOVEL, PATRICK SUSKIND HAS ASSURED HIMSELF A PLACE BESIDE THEMOST IMPORTANT... WRITERS OF OUR TIME." --San Francisco Chronicle "MESMERISING FROM FIRST PAGE TO LAST... a highly sophisticated horror tale... The last section of PERFUME takes on the frantic dimensions of a superior mystery story...SUPERB STORY--TELLING ALL THE WAY... THE CLIMAX IS A SAVAGE SHOCKER." --Cleveland PlainDealer "A BESTSELLER THAT ALSO EXISTS AS A STRANGE AND INGENIOUS WORK OF LITERATURE...PERFUME has many dimensions. It is a meditation upon irrationality and the Age of Reason; upon obsession and illusion; upon solipsism and art. Thesensuous, supple prose moves with a pantherish grace..." --Boston Globe "AN EXCELLENT AND MOST EXTRAORDINARY FIRST NOVEL..." --Chicago Tribune "AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER... A FASCINATING AND HORRIFYING TALE... BRILLIANT." --Library Journal "AN INGENIOUS STORY... ABOUT A MOST EXOTIC MONSTER... SUSPENSE BUILDS UP STEADILY,PARTICULARLY AT THE END." --Los Angeles Times "UNUSUAL AND COMPELLING... PERFUME offers a riot for the senses... PERFUME READS CHILLINGLY LIKE A WELL--DOCUMENTED, VERIFIABLE CASE HISTORY OFLUNACY AND MASS HYSTERIA." --Publishers Weekly "AN ORIGINAL, GRUESOME, COMPELLING NOVEL..." --Christian Science Monitor "The story spins along like an ancient tale out of the Arabian Nights with both suspense and horrorgrowing steadily... A tour de force of the imagination, a spell--weaving experience..." --People "Like the best scents, PERFUME's effects will linger long after it has been stoppered..." --Time "MR. SUSKIND'S INGENUITY PACKS PERFUME WITH FRESH POWER. GRENOUILLE GROWS INTOAS COMPELLING A HEARTLESS FIEND--MADDENED BY AN UNCARING WORLD--AS YOU COULDASK FOR." --The Wall Street Journal Perfume THE STORY OF A MURDERER Translated from the German by John E. Woods Originally published in German as Das Parfum PART IOneIN EIGHTEENTH--CENTURY France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted andabominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His storywill be told here. His name was Jean--Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name--in contrast to the namesof other gifted abominations, de Sade's, for instance, or Saint--Just's, Fbuche's, Bonaparte's, etc.--has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those morefamous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, towickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves notraces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to usmodern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwellsstank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; theunaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and thepungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.The stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, andfrom the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat andunwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that ofonions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancidcheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, thechurches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did thepriest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the kinghimself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in theeighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there wasno human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decayinglife that was not accompanied by stench.And of course the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city ofFrance. And in turn there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench:between the rue aux Fers and the rue de la Ferronnerie, the Cimetiere des Innocents to be exact.For eight hundred years the dead had been brought here from the Hotel--Dieu and from thesurrounding parish churches, for eight hundred years, day in, day out, corpses by the dozens hadbeen carted here and tossed into long ditches, stacked bone upon bone for eight hundred years inthe tombs and charnel houses. Only later--on the eve of the Revolution, after several of the gravepits had caved in and the stench had driven the swollen graveyard's neighbours to more thanmere protest and to actual insurrection--was it finally closed and abandoned. Millions of bones andskulls were shovelled into the catacombs of Montmartre and in its place a food market was erected.Here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom, Jean--Baptiste Grenouilie was born onJuly 17, 1738. It was one of the hottest days of the year. The heat lay leaden upon thegraveyard, squeezing its putrefying vapour, a blend of rotting melon and the foetid odour of burntanimal horn, out into the nearby alleys. When the labour pains began, Grenouille's mother wasstanding at a fish stall in the rue aux Fers, scaling whiting that she had just gutted. The fish,ostensibly taken that very morning from the Seine, already stank so vilely that the smell maskedthe odour of corpses. Grenouille's mother, however, perceived the odour neither of the fish nor ofthe corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and thepain deadened all susceptibility to sensate impressions. She only wanted the pain to stop, shewanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She hadeffected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths or semi--stillbirths, for thebloody meat that had emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already,nor had lived much longer, and by evening the whole mess had been shovelled away and cartedoff to the graveyard or down to the river. It would be much the same this day, and Grenouille'smother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid--twenties, and who still was quite prettyand had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and--except for gout andsyphilis and a touch of consumption--suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live awhile yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as thehonorable wife of a widower with a trade or some such to bear real children... Grenouille's motherwished that it were already over. And when the final contractions began, she squatted down underthe gutting table and there gave birth, as she had done four times before, and cut the newbornthing's umbilical cord with her butcher knife. But then, on account of the heat and the stench,which she did not perceive as such but only as an unbearable, numbing something--like a field oflilies or a small room filled with too many daffodils--she grew faint, toppled to one side, fell out fromunder the table into the street, and lay there, knife in hand.Tumult and turmoil. The crowd stands in a circle around her, staring, someone hails the police. Thewoman with the knife in her hand is still lying in the street. Slowly she comes to.What has happened to her?"Nothing."What is she doing with that knife?"Nothing." Where does the blood on her skirt come from?"From the fish."She stands up, tosses the knife aside, and walks off to wash.And then, unexpectedly, the infant under the gutting table begins to squall. They have a look, andbeneath a swarm of flies and amid the offal and fish heads they discover the newborn child. Theypull it out. As prescribed by law, they give it to a wet nurse and arrest the mother. And since sheconfesses, openly admitting that she would definitely have let the thing perish, just as she had withthose other four by the way, she is tried, found guilty of multiple infanticide, and a few weekslaterdecapitated at the place de Greve.By that time the child had already changed wet nurses three times. No one wanted to keep it formore than a couple of days. It was too greedy, they said, sucked as much as two babies, deprivedthe other sucklings of milk and them, the wet nurses, of their livelihood, for it was impossible tomake a living nursing just one babe. The police officer in charge, a man named La Fosse, instantlywearied of the matter and wanted to have the child sent to a halfway house for foundlings andorphans at the far end of the rue Saint--Antoine, from which transports of children weredispatched daily to the great public orphanage in Rouen. But since these convoys were made upof porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants wereplaced at a time; since therefore the mortality rate on the road was extraordinarily high; since forthat reason the porters were urged to convey only baptised infants and only those furnished withan official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; since the babe Grenouillehad neither been baptised nor received so much as a name to inscribe officially on the certificate oftransport; since, moreover, it would not have been good form for the police anonymously to set achild at the gates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to dodge the otherformalities... thus, because of a whole series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties thatseemed likely to occur if the child were shunted aside, and because time was short as well, officerLa Fosse revoked his original decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over onwritten receipt to some ecclesiastical institution or other, so that there they could baptise him anddecide his further fate. He got rid of him at the cloister of Saint--Merri in the rue Saint--Martin. Therethey baptised him with the name Jean--Baptiste. And because on that day the prior was in a goodmood and the eleemosynary fund not yet exhausted, they did not have the child shipped toRouen, but instead pampered him at the cloister's expense. To this end, he was given to a wetnurse named Jeanne Bussie who lived in the rue Saint--Denis and was to receive, until furthernotice, three francs per week for her trouble.