Before spending too long in the Aroma industry, books like Arctander, Poucher & Guenther become familiar references for the raw materials of our trade. But what of fiction? “Perfume - the Story of a Murder” by Patrick Süskind was published in 1986 in the UK and has become widely known & read in our industry. Essentially this is a story concerned with murdering young women to capture the very essence of their being in order to construct a perfume which will give him power over his fellow man. Five years later, the magnificently zany “Jitterbug Perfume” by Tom Robbins was published here, quickly achieved an almost cult-like status. Images in the book, such as perfumers donning whalemasks and standing by open windows seeking inspiration from faint thoughts echoing down the centuries have made a lasting impression on me at least (see what you're missing if you haven't read it!). Many of us have gone on to read the entire Tom Robbins catalogue!
To name a third fiction book, which has some significant perfumery context, might be a lot more more difficult for many readers. My nomination would be J. K. Huysmans “Against Nature”. Huysmans himself was born in Paris in 1848, and became a minor civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. After writing a number of novels, Against Nature was published in 1884: a restless and compelling novel which made such an impression on Oscar Wilde (who’s hero refers to the book in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" as “the strangest book that he had ever read”). Further accolades included Arthur Symonds comment that the book was “the breviary of the Decadence”.
The novel describes a journey through psychosomatic nervous illness resulting in monstrous depravity of the senses (or “mal de siecle”). In order to ease this misery our subject, in Chapter 10, experiments in perfumery, but in trying to seek the refuge of relief via the products from his atomizers, we are really witnessing a form of early aromatherapy. To set the episode in context, the author thoroughly describes the background of the early art, and displays a sound knowledge of many perfumery raw materials, some of which would be familiar to us, others now being more obscure. To find out how it all ends, read the book!
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© 2000 by Tony Burfield
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