He is the son of the well-known writer and journalist Wilhelm Süskind, who, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, regularly wrote about his son in his editorials. Patrick Süskind was born in Ambach, near Munich, on March 26, 1949. A rare portrait of the author, from 2012 Image: Hans Kumpf Following a decades-long wait to obtain film rights from the author, Perfume was finally made into a film in 2006 by director Tom Twyker. Süskind did not attend the premiere. He has given a grand total of four interviews, according to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, most of them from the 1980s. Süskind lives a reclusive life between Munich and France.
It's a bit of a personal irony that the author who opened the door for me to contemporary German literature is himself so entirely absent from the scene. He has won numerous literary prizes for his works, many of which he has declined to receive. The Bavarian-born author also has written various TV screenplays, novellas and essays, as well as published translations of work by the French cartoonist Jean-Jacque Sempes. While Perfume is Süskind's only novel, it is not his only work. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Read more: What makes a book a best-seller? It also became an international best-seller that has been translated into 49 languages and sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The move paid off for the German publishing house: The novel spent nine years on the best-seller list of the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel. Perfume was rejected numerous times before finally getting published in 1985 by Diogenes. Reading Perfume was a physical experience I could smell the scenes printed on the pages, and I became more aware of the odors and scents surrounding me in my everyday life, deepening its dimensions and making me more present in it.Īfter finishing the book, keen to read anything by Süskind, I went to the public library to see what other novels by him I could check out.
The writing was magnetic I felt powerless to resist Süskind's ability to intertwine the gruesome with the sublime, just as the victims in the novel were powerless to resist the repulsive protagonist's olfactory manipulations. The evocative language, the vivid descriptions pulled me into this story of a murderous perfumer and his superordinary sense of smell. DW's Cristina Burack Image: Bilal El Soussi It was the first work of contemporary German literature that I tackled on my own outside of a classroom, underlining words in pencil in the street car to look up later in the dictionary. I read it in German around 10 years ago when I was still a relative newcomer to the language.
Perfume: The Story of A Murderer (1985) by German author Patrick Süskind is the kind of book that makes you miss your tram stop.
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