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SNSKIND, Patrick.Perfume: The story of a murderer. Reprinted edition. EditoraVintage Books USA, 2001.

This book relates the story of the personage Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a gifted

person who was born amidst the rot of a fish market in eighteenth-century France, where his

mother worked as a saleswoman. She didnt give him any attention, then he was supposed to

die in his first minutes of life, but he didnt, and started to cry, making people notice that he

was there, which also leads his mother to get arrested and condemned to death.

On Jean Baptistes childhood, he was constantly subjected to situations that

evidenced the natural contempt of the world for him because of the disturbance of people

about his lack of smell.

He grew up in Madame Gaillards orphanage where he faced various forms of

aggression and learned to keep himself in his own world. Nothing gave to the world apart

from his droppings, neither a smile, nor a cry, nor a shine on the face, not even his own odor.

(SSKIND. 2001. p. 26). But, although he has no scent of his own, he had an incomparable

sense of smell, which made him capable of identify and classify different kind of smell even

if they were considerably distant.The owner of the orphanage sold him to the owner of a tannery, where he worked

hard, and after working, he was usually gone for a walk to explore the city. In one of these

nights, he smelled the perfect scent, and followed it, and got shocked to find that the scent of

a beautiful and young woman who didnt allowed him to get close of her, then he killed her to

get a better smell of her scent, but it ceased after the death. Jean-Baptiste got the idea that his

life would lose the sense if he didnt know it down to the smallest details, to the last and most

subtle of its branches; not even the most complex recall that he could save would be enough.He wished he could print this perfume a seal, in the folds of his dark soul, and then study it in

detail and finally comply with the internal structures of this magic formula to guide his

thinking, his life and his smell.

Some time passed while he kept in his search for ways to isolate and to maintain

the scents, and he became an apprentice in Giuseppe Baldinis perfumery, which was passing

through a period of few customers. In a short period of time, Grenouille stood out as a

perfumer, overcame Baldini, and got a reputation never seen before, and, creating new perfumes, revitalized Baldinis perfumery.

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