#grenouille the tick

[clearcloudlesssky]

BONJOUR (i really need to stop opening all my asks with this line there is not a singular french bone in my body)

you seem like a cool and intellectual person (everything i aspire to be fr)! and you speak mandarin like me (事实说，我的华文很糟糕...我的母语怎么说到那么差哎呀呀)! and you're friends with all my friends (i'm like a human detector device i see new person on my friends' blogs i stalk their page and follow them ehehehhj)

like we have to be besties at this point/j

my question: gush over your favourite book?? like GUSH IDC IF I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT I WILL LISTEN TO EVERY DETAIL

NEE HOW 没关系---其实我的中文也很糟糕 (ಥ﹏ಥ))

thank you so much for the ask!! i'm VERY new to interacting on tumblr so this is like really really really cool to me lmao

also PLEASE i am not a intellectual or a cool person do not aspire to be like me you don't know what i did last year under the blood red full moon of october 27th at 3:27pm

ok the gushing part I'LL TRY TO STICK TO BOOKS/MEDIA NO PROMISES THOUGH

generally speaking my favorite books are the ones i'm reading/have just read, so right now they'd prob be perfume as you who have stalked my blog may be able to tell and probably coriolanus which i am rereading rn @bassguitarinablackt-shirt i told you about coriolanus last year sobs

i was forced to read perfume by a friend of mine -- she's a sucker for these totally reprehensible, incorrigible characters, and she'd been ranting abt perfume for aaaages. and it sounded kinda perverse but at the same time really interesting so i read it and it was actually really good...

ok and just in case this monstrosity below convinces anyone to read perfume, there's a few warnings in hand

perfume is a decently dark book, there's like 26 total murders, and the ending is...interesting. the author has a talent for creating unique, immersive descriptions but like maybe 20-30% of the time these descriptions lean towards eroticism so if you don't like that pls be warned?

if you've ever seen food wars think that but with really really good smells

ok now to start

i think that perfume is really cool because it's one of those where there's exactly one, very very clear theme - others may crop up but this feels super central, and that theme would probably be human greed, and the tendencies of humans to destroy that which they most love. it dives into total obsession and the idea of wanting to possess something so much, so badly that you destroy it in that greed, and the poster boy for this idea is the main character of the book, jean-baptiste grenouille, who murders those with scents he desperately wants to possess

the entire book is very unique in that it focuses itself around one sense - smell, and this creates a lot of really cool descriptions and a pov that you've probably never thought of before.

the mc himself is also a really interesting character - he's totally dominated by this sense, he's like a dog but ten times more sensitive to smell. he doesn't care about other human beings at all, he doesn't care about physical pain, or visually beautiful things, he only cares about the smells around him. he has a urge to possess all of them, to learn how to create them and collect them. i've spoken about his inhumanness and other stuff before so i won't go into that (this is long sobs i haven't even spoken abt coriolanus)

ok what's below is a weirder interpretation..

one of the ideas that popped out to me when i was reading is that the author uses individual scents as an analogy for a soul. everything in grenonuille's world has a scent. it is what defines them. it is what makes them them in his worldview, and for him to lack a scent means that he lacks a soul, and this only further emphasizes his inhumanity. he's terrified when he realizes this, and his lack of a smell is what actually pushes other humans away from him

by attempting to create a sort of "ultimate perfume" for himself, he seeks to give himself a soul, a sense of being, but he's left full of hatred and fear once he realizes that people don't care for him, the soulless, scentless grenouille, but the scent he created. they aren't attracted to him as a person, they're attracted to his ultimate perfume, and their sheer olfactory gullibility disgusts him. i can elaborate but that means spoiling the rest of the book and i don't wanna do that TwT

this leaves no room for coriolanus but let it be said this is a goofy ass book (i love it but still) generally shakespeare is a bit dry? for me and i don't take a lot of enjoyment out of it but i had fun reading coriolanus

the main idea of coriolanus is a general, a military hero who enters the cutthroat world of roman politics, and is absolutely destroyed. his bluntness, refusal to compromise, and above all pride makes him psychologically ill-suited to become a politician, generally i feel that a lot of traits that made him an excellent general turn on him once he becomes a consul (think president).

he has an absolutely wack relationship with his mom, who i feel is like the roman equivalent of that one parent who's basically living through their child. from the start to the end, she's the one pulling his strings. she's the one who pushed him to military success, she's the primary one who pushed him to become consul, and it's her who's able to convince him to spare Rome when he finally leaves to seek revenge. and when she returns to rome? it's her who gets the glory, it's her who's hailed as rome's savior, while coriolanus himself is brutally murdered at the end of the book.

to me, she comes across as someone who's hyper-ambitious, and perhaps as a woman in ancient rome, she wasn't able to move anywhere with those ambitions, so she pushed them onto her son instead. she speaks of blood and swords and death, and is prideful that her son was sent into battle at a young age.

honestly their relationship is one of my favorites from this play, and the only scene that i enjoy more than the death scene is uh coriolanus's arch nemesis speaking about him..

"Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me; We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat; And waked half dead with nothing"

And there's also this

"Than thee, all noble Marcius. Let me twine Mine arms about that body, where against My grained ash an hundred times hath broke, And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip The anvil of my sword, and do contest As hotly and as nobly with thy love As ever in ambitious strength I did Contend against thy valour. Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart"

yep additional note coriolanus's full name is gaius marcius coriolanus

they're a little bit silly aufidius totally isn't the one assassinating him at the end nope

SORRTY THIS WAS REALLY LONG

[ubasjuice]

[PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER] 2006

"With his incredible talent for discerning scents, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is one of 18th-century France's finest perfumers. He becomes obsessed with capturing an elusive aroma: the scent of young womanhood. His search takes a deadly turn, and when the bodies of 12 young females are found, panic breaks out, with families rushing to lock up their daughters."

Can't believe I missed out on this one. It's Sweeney Todd-ish (loved this one) minus the musical numbers.

Watching films where the Antagonist is the main character feels unique, it's like looking through their eyes, hearing their thoughts, and shows you what makes them tick; which has always fascinated me.

Character development was properly and literally shown, from a newborn to a kid, from teen to adulthood, his search for the perfect scent never waivered.

Whoever thought of the idea on the process of which he makes his perfumes was a psychopath. It's brilliant and disturbing at the same time.

The film contains a lot of nudity, but little to no gore. Definitely not for kids.

Juiciness: 10/10

[summmmerwine]

“Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again.

In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest. True, he bore scars and chafings and scabs from it all, and a slightly crippled foot left him with a limp, but he lived. He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before. He required a minimum ration of food and clothing for his body. For his soul he required nothing. Security, attention, tenderness, love-or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require— were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille. Or rather, so it seems to us, he had totally dispensed with them just to go on living-from the very start.

He was an abomination from the start.

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice.”

When I read this book as a teenager it resonated with me so much. At the time I had no friends, at school everyone hated me. At home I lived in a wallpaperless room, with no light shade, I slept in the corner of the room on a mattress on the floor. It was an unhealthy atmosphere of conflicts and constant adult hysteria. I didn’t eat much and I didn’t have many clothes. I didn’t have anything that made me happy, I suffered a lot and there was a point when I did decide in favour of life out of sheer spite.

I think quite often when I had hard times or was unhappy I recalled this phrase: “Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again.” And it helped me a lot.

[words--words--words]

The lonely tick which, wrapped up in itself, huddles in its tree, blind, deaf and dumb, and simply sniffs, sniffs all year long, for miles around, for the blood of some passing animal that it could never reach under its own power. The tick could let itself drop. It could fall to the floor of the forest and creep a millimetre or two here or there on its six tiny legs and lie down to die under the leaves - it would be no great loss, God knows. But the tick, stubborn, sullen and loathsome, huddles there and lives and waits. Waits, for that most improbable of chances that will bring blood, in animal form, directly beneath its tree. And only then does it abandon caution and drop and scratch and bore and bite into that alien flesh...

The young Grenouille was such a tick. He lived encapsulated in himself and waited for better times. He gave the world nothing but his dung - no smile, no cry, no glimmer in the eye, not even his own scent. Every other woman would have kicked this monstrous child out. But not Madame Gaillard. She could not smell that he did not smell, and she expected no stirrings from his soul, because her own was sealed tight.

Patrick Süskind, Perfume (trans. John E. Woods)

[cyberneticienne]

He had a tough constitution. Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again. He could eat watery soup for days on end, he managed on the thinnest milk, digested the rottenest vegetables and spoiled meat. In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty–foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest. True, he bore scars and chafings and scabs from it all, and a slightly crippled foot left him with a limp, but he lived. He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before. He required a minimum ration of food and clothing for his body. For his soul he required nothing. Security, attention, tenderness, love–or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require–were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille. Or rather, so it seems to us, he had totally dispensed with them just to go on living–from the very start. The cry that followed his birth, the cry with which he had brought himself to people’s attention and his mother to the gallows, was not an instinctive cry for sympathy and love. That cry, emitted upon careful consideration, one might almost say upon mature consideration, was the newborn’s decision against love and nevertheless for life. Under the circumstances, the latter was possible only without the former, and had the child demanded both, it would doubtless have abruptly come to a grisly end. […] He decided in favour of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice.

[freewhispersmaker]

Perfume essay – is grenouille evil?

Perfume essay – is grenouille evil?

  Grenouille provides several further examples of being abnormal throughout the novel Perfume, but it is the picture that Suskind paints of Grenouille that makes him seem so bad. He is not inherently evil, but Suskind makes him seem so. At Madame Gaillard’s, he discovers his ability to smell, and the power that comes with it. Suskind expresses Grenouille as a tick, “stubborn, sullen and…