FSF Magazine, June 2007 Read online

  When Paulus opened his eyes, Myros was looking at him from the cave entrance. “For this you made me kill children,” Paulus said.

  "I made you do nothing,” Myros said, and made a gesture with his ringed hand.

  Paulus was alight with pain: every blade that had ever cut him cut him anew. He felt the teeth of dogs and the dragon's talons, the piercing of an arrow and the grate of a spearpoint across his skull. Thumbs gouged at his eyes, and bootheels ground his fingers. He dropped his sword and felt his knees buckle. Blood roared in his ears, and somewhere beyond it he heard Myros’ footsteps on the stones of the trail. Looking up through tears, he saw the apprentice coming nearer. You misjudge me, Paulus thought, and drank of his pain until it had given him strength to stand, and when he had gotten to his feet he left his sword where it lay and fell upon Myros with bare hands.

  When it was done, he lay gasping on the stony ground as the apprentice's spell slowly faded from his body. He felt as if he was being knit together again, and when the pain had faded into the leaden dullness that for Paulus always followed killing, he got to his feet. Leaving his sword where it lay, he walked a short distance into the cave, to the point where the light from without finally failed. Trailing away into the dark, the bones of the dragon had already begun taking on the color of the stones around them.

  One more, Paulus remembered thinking. I was right, and I was wrong.

  * * * *

  It was afternoon when he returned to Will's farm. The boy was on his hands and knees following an insect through the beaten grass. He looked up at Paulus’ approach and stood. “There's a beetle there,” he said.

  Paulus knew in that moment how little he understood of children, and how enormous his task was. “Your name is Paulus. Is that right?” he asked.

  The boy nodded, but his attention was already wandering back to the beetle. He parted the grasses looking for it.

  "My name is Paulus too."

  The boy looked over his shoulder at Paulus. Where, Paulus wondered? A place without wizards. A place without these bargains driven for your soul. A place where my boy will not follow my path. He realized he had forgotten his sword, and resolved that he would never wear another. Let the Lesson be.

  "You're going to come with me,” Paulus said.

  And the boy said, “Where are we going?"

  Films: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by David J. Skal

  The word “synesthesia” signifies a confusion of the senses—a fascinating phenomenon often associated with psychedelic states in which one can taste music, for instance, or visualize smell. In the latter regard, the long-awaited film version of Patrick Süskind's 1985 bestseller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer qualifies as synesthetic cinema of an ambitious order, using every filmmaker's trick short of Smell-o-Vision or Odorama to convince an audience that it's actually smelling something onscreen, or at least identifying with a protagonist who can smell things no mortal has ever sniffed before.

  Long considered unfilmable (no less a filmmaker than Stanley Kubrick is said to have thrown up his hands at the very thought of the task), ten million euros for the screen rights to Perfume seems to have been incentive enough for Süskind to come to all of his senses and allow director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) to craft an impressive, if in many ways problematic, photoplay.

  Both novel and film tell the vampirish tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (the surname means frog), “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.” Born barely alive in the stinking squalor of a Paris fish market in 1738, Grenouille is possessed of a superhuman olfactory sense, while personally possessing no corporeal scent. Since nature famously discriminates against vacuums, Grenouille compensates by obsessively studying and collecting all the scents of the world, a self-taught activity that leads him, inexorably (how else, in a story like this?), to become the apprentice of a flamboyantly has-been master perfumer, under whose selfish tutelage he learns the basic techniques of scent distillation in a crumbling mansion precariously perched on a bridge over the Seine. With Grenouille's help, the perfumer regains his former glory, only to be killed when his structurally challenged house unceremoniously collapses into the river.

  With sexual maturation Grenouille becomes acutely aware of female scents. He accidentally kills a young woman he has stalked, and, having had the opportunity to appreciate the intoxicating aroma of her corpse, fully realizes the meaning and purpose of his life. Grenouille rapidly becomes a serial killer with bloodhound-ish instincts rivaling those of Hannibal Lecter. He moves to the perfume center of Grasse in the south of France, and there applies the advanced techniques of scent capture to the task of distilling, alongside his day job, an ultimate, elusive fragrance stolen from the corpses of virginal women.

  With each murder he compounds and intensifies the mystical scent, finally incorporating it into his very being. He becomes a monster both messianic and misanthropic. When captured by the authorities and sentenced to die, he unleashes the fragrance, which brings the men and women of Grasse to their adoring knees, followed by a public orgy unprecedented in human history. The traumatized townsfolk completely erase from consciousness Grenouille, his crimes, and most important, their own transgressions. His life's work complete, Grenouille returns to Paris, dousing himself with the last of the perfume in order to be summarily cannibalized by a mob who believe they are acting out of love.

  Whew. Or, perhaps just whiff. Perfume is a manipulative knockout as a novel, especially on first exposure to the masterful English translation by John E. Woods. The narrative moves with the concentrated intensity of a fairy tale, demanding much—perhaps too much—suspension of disbelief along the way. On first reading, the story seems to be a profound allegory, but repeated visits raise the question: an allegory of what? Grenouille has been persuasively (however contradictorily) interpreted by critics as alternately representing Hitler and Christ (to be kind to Hitler and Christ, Dracula has suffered a similar critical fate). His mad experiments distinctly evoke the Frankenstein/Faust mythos. It's also a sick study of unrequited love and obsessive over-idealization, suggesting Goethe and Young Werther. Delving further into Germanic folklore, the scent-free Grenouille echoes aspects of Peter Schlemihl, the man who famously lost his shadow.

  But after two or three readings, the novel's ultimate meaning is ambiguous at best. The mythic aspects of the tale are at essential odds with Süskind's prodigious historical research, which is mesmerizing. Who outside the hermetically sealed world of perfumers ever thought about how perfume was actually made? Or how fascinating the real process could be? Once Süskind pulls us into his authoritatively smelly web, we're prepared to believe almost anything. Following a strategy Bram Stoker chose in the composition of Dracula, the narrative is loaded with enough convincing historical detail to sell a fantastic premise.

  No doubt about it, Grenouille is indeed a vampire, however allegorical. Blood lust is metaphorically displaced as smell-lust. Grenouille's lack of a personal scent—he apparently is some kind of a living, breathing stick of Right Guard, which gives him a certain invisiblity in an overpoweringly odorous world—parallels the vampire's traditional missing shadow or reflection. Stoker could have learned a few things from Süskind in terms of building his vampire's character—imagine the possibilities of Dracula's disgust at the human race and his shackled dependence upon it—but it is just this kind of interiorized characterization that made Perfume such a difficult film property, and probably would have hobbled Dracula's media life as well.

  Perfume is reportedly the most expensive feature ever produced in Germany. Frank Griebe's cinematography is, shot-by-shot, drop-dead gorgeous, and that's not necessarily a compliment. Arguably, a grittier approach would have better evoked the unpleasant pungency of eighteenth-century France, where perfumes routinely compensated for well-documented deficits in personal hygiene. Instead of trying endlessly to conjure the look and feel of upscale cosmetics commercials, the filmmakers c
ould have been a bit more forthcoming in documenting the unpalatable sights and smells of a time when people sometimes sewed themselves into progressively ripe finery instead of bathing, and caulked their unsightly smallpox scars with grotesquely thick white lead makeup (eliminated, of course, from the censoriously flattering oil portraits of the time). Where are the universally reeking chamber pots? The open sewers? Food rotting in the absence of refrigeration? Flies and bugs spreading contagion everywhere? What of the legendary, pervasive foulness of the Parisian charnel houses and cemeteries? And, for that matter, where are everyone's festering, stinking dental abscesses? Cheap perfumes were undoubtedly used as mouthwash in those days, not to mention their obvious utility as the chamber-pot equivalent of Ty-D-Bowl. I would have liked Perfume to have risen to a grotesque level of hyper-surrealism that escapes the film as produced. David Cronenberg, where were you?

  The olfactory brain reels at the missed, sick-making cinematic opportunities (which, admittedly, would have done little at the multiplexes to promote the sale of rancid popcorn). Using visual imagery alone, Perfume's creative team does manage to convey the ambient nausea of the Paris fish market, and does admirable back flips in its other efforts to represent smell indirectly. If I am not mistaken, there is at least one nearly subliminal P.O.V. shot from inside Grenouille's infant nose, even before he's shed his umbilical cord. That certainly constitutes going the extra yard.

  Throughout the novel, Grenouille is described as ugly, though no one can say exactly what aspect of his person repels. Here, Süskind may well be paying infamous homage to Stevenson's Edward Hyde, who had much the same problem. But even Süskind waffles on this matter; late in the book Grenouille is described as both lame and hunchbacked. Ben Whishaw, while not a conventional cover boy, has no such issues (the actor effectively impersonated Keith Richards in 2005's Stoned). However, the director, screenwriters, and performer have chosen to subvert the novelist's conception of Grenouille at every turn. Süskind takes us obsessively into the character's every perception, emphasizing his gnawing misanthropy and swelling megalomania. When I first read the novel, the young Peter Lorre immediately sprang to mind as an ideal if impossible casting choice. Whishaw comes across as an inarticulate savant who can flare his nostrils sensuously, but never lets us in on his deepest thoughts or intentions.

  John Hurt's episodic narration, taken directly from the book, is a stilted device, though perhaps the perfect stratagem for a film already walking dangerously on stilts. If only there had been more of it. Additional narration would have done much to complement Whishaw's performance and deepen our understanding of the character.

  One may forgive Dustin Hoffman, an indelibly American film icon if there ever was one, for not being entirely convincing as an eighteenth century Italian transplanted to Paris. Nonetheless, he steals the show as Guiseppe Baldini, the faded master perfumer whose fortunes are reinvigorated by Grenouille's preternatural talent. Bewigged and be-rouged when not outright bewildered by the new tricks Grenouille teaches him, Hoffman's showboating performance is carefully calibrated just at the edge of camp, never sailing over, and the whole sequence of Grenouille's apprenticeship emerges as a film-within-a-film, with its own sturdy beginning, middle, and end.

  One can imagine an alternate, and, perhaps, more satisfying, version of the screenplay in which Baldini lingers around until nearly the end, increasingly aware of Grenouille's monstrous crimes and his own complicity. The viewer is drawn to Baldini because he is motivated by ordinary human foibles like pride and greed. Grenouille, in the film, is highly perplexing, even to modern audiences spoon-fed from the cradle with a myriad of mediagenic sociopaths and serial killers. The collapse of Baldini's house on the bridge is a digital coup de théâtre with the kind of dramatic finality that should have been saved for the film's true climax.

  The final scenes create all manner of problems, which pile upon each other annoyingly. As Grenouille's final victim, Rachel Hurd-Wood shows more spunk than her predecessors and for a while we wonder if she will be the triumphant “last girl” à la slasher film protocol. Alas, no. As her father, Alan Rickman possesses a physiognomy so similar to Dustin Hoffman's that we can't help but wonder how he would have fared as Baldini (probably pretty well). And how, for instance, does Grenouille manage to preserve the last flacon of the ultimate perfume while being stripped, shackled, tortured, and moved from cell to cell? Süskind's fairy-tale logic fares less well on the screen than on the page.

  And there are, sadly, more missteps toward the end of the film. A rapid-fire sequence in which a succession of women are snatched from the streets of Grasse is unintentionally comic, and provoked titters at the screening I attended. The scenes in which Grenouille slathers animal fat on the nude corpses of his victims to extract their smells are intended to be necrophile-sensuous, but end up just schmaltzy in the most literal, unsentimental use of the word. Director Tykwer then drops the ball badly for the orgy, staged disappointingly as a tepid, ‘60s-style love-in, with no sense of the townspeople's horror and denial in confronting their own frenzied animalism. In the novel, Grenouille's self-sacrificial death is depicted as a cannibal attack straight out of Suddenly, Last Summer. “...the human body is tough and not easily dismembered, even horses have great difficulty accomplishing it...[Grenouille] was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself, and then, driven by voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it. A half-hour later, Jean Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared utterly from the earth.” The film, however, opts for tasteful, stylized choreography with no graphic violence. The townspeople cover Grenouille in a tightly controlled circle, diving in like politely synchronized swimmers from an Esther Williams musical.

  Sometimes less is more, but sometimes more is better.

  Like the novel, Perfume the movie impresses at first but falters upon subsequent reflection, rather like a vampire too often exposed to daylight. And yet, despite a running time approaching two and a half hours, the film never bores, riveting the viewer's attention from moment to moment in a manner synesthetically consistent with its literary source. Which, given the ignominious fates of so many other novels consigned to the dream factory, might be something for which we all should be grateful.

  First Was the Word by Sheila Finch

  Sheila Finch has written about a dozen stories concerning the Lingsters, including a passel of short stories and the novels Triad and Reading the Bones. She has recently assembled the Lingster short stories into one volume which is due to be published soon under the title The Guild of Xenolinguists. In the process of assembling the book, she was inspired to go back to the beginning and write the story about how it all started—and she was pleased to find out that it didn't quite originate in the way she'd always thought. We think you'll also be pleased to see how the guild originated.

  Jamal Lenana paused, his breath rasping. The ascent was harder than he'd expected. The antigrav lift-belt he'd let the cute shop assistant talk him into purchasing in Moshi at the foot of Kilimanjaro seemed to be an expensive fake; he was doing most of the work instead of the other way around. When you gonna learn, bro? he thought. Always a sucker for the ladies.

  Stupid to attempt this in the sweltering temperatures of September, with or without a working lift-belt. A month ago, he'd been finishing up his Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. At the last minute, the committee had balked at his ideas about the emergence of language, something so fundamentally driven by biology he'd made the outrageous suggestion it might even control the development of alien languages—if humans ever had the luck to meet any. So he'd walked out, leaving his dissertation and his career on the seminar table, and gone to Africa.

  Mopping his brow, he turned his attention back to Kilimanjaro's snow-covered peak. At least another couple of hours to the top, but unless the antigrav belt worked as advertised, he wasn't going to make it. He'd come up a long way from the scrub plateau of the plains, through the lower, cultivated slopes and the cloud forest, and had
reached a more open section of grassy moor, yet he seemed to be only halfway. The incense of desert country laced with the wild scent of animals rose up to his sensitive nose. This might be Mother Africa, he thought, but there was too much American in his African blood for him to be comfortable with the fierce sun so near the equator. Getting to the caldera at the top of Kilimanjaro was rapidly losing its charm.

  His gaze was caught by a dark bird circling on a thermal. Vulture, maybe, scanning for fresh kill. It flew toward him, following the path up the mountain. It grew bigger, and he could see it was a helicopter, not a bird.

  The craft, painted a dull, unreflective black, made an almost silent approach. It bore no markings or identification of any kind. Now he could see the pilot and another man beside him—and if he hadn't known better, he'd have thought the chopper's occupants were looking for him.

  "Dr. Lenana?” the craft's PA boomed.

  The chopper settled to the ground a few feet away. The blades slowed, stopped. A man in boots and a camouflage flight suit with no identifying patches slid down from the open hatch and gazed at him.

  "You are Dr. Jamal Lenana?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "Come with us, please."

  He shook his head. “You're looking for someone else, bro."

  The man, with a bony face and tight mouth that looked as if it didn't waste much energy smiling, adjusted dark glasses. “We were sent to find you specifically, Dr. Lenana."

  Damn RFIDs and GPS and the rest of the surveillance alphabet, he thought. Too easy to find anybody anywhere these days. It had to be bad news about his father. The old man would be almost ninety by now, and they hadn't spoken in years. Lenana Senior had retired from the army as a two-star general and gone to work for the NSA. He had connections with the defense and intelligence gathering communities; he must've asked old friends to find his son.