ABSTRACT
The reclusive Süskind has had considerable international impact as author of an (as yet) small œuvre, centred on solitary, obsessive figures. In Das Parfum, Die Geschichte eines Mörders (1985) the uncanny sense of smell possessed by Jean Baptiste Grenouille, brought up amidst the stinking refuse of the Paris fish market in the middle of the eighteenth century, inspires him with the ambition to create a scent that would allow him to seduce all whom he encounters, achieved by collecting the aroma exhaled by the virgins he murders. On his way to the scaffold his power allows him to induce amongst the bystanders a bacchanalian frenzy, to which after a temporary escape he eventually falls victim. Of the interpretations suggested (post-modern fantasy lacking moral implications or allegory of mass delusion prompted by Hitler and the Third Reich) the first is the more plausible in view of the linguistic virtuosity which contributed more than any other feature to the book’s success. Totally different kinds of eccentricity are exemplified in Die Taube (1987), in which the self-imposed regular and uneventful routine of a security guard is destroyed by the appearance of a stray dove, in Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer (1991), in which a constantly walking misanthrope, after saving a small boy (the narrator in retrospect) from carrying out his wish to end it all, drowns himself in the Starnberger See, and in the dramatic monologue Der Kontrabaβ (1981), in which a double bass player dreams of crying out the name of the opera diva he reveres from afar during a quiet orchestral passage.
