PERFUME, THE STORY OF A MURDERER by Patrick Süskind

... Patrick Süskind (born 26 March 1949) was born in Ambach am Starnberger See, near Munich in Germany.
His best-known work is the internationally acclaimed bestseller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985). This was made into a film in 2006 by Tom Tykwer. Perfume was on the bestselling list of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel for nine years. He is also the author of a novella, The Pigeon (1988), The Story of Mr. Sommer (1991), Three Stories and a Reflection (1996), and a collection of essays, On Love and Death (2006).
Süskind lives as a recluse in Munich, in Seeheim (Lake Starnberg), and in France. The public knows little about Süskind currently. He has withdrawn from the literary scene in Germany and never grants interviews or allows photos.

PERFUME, THE STORY OF A MURDERER

...PATRICK SUSKIND'S novel is a book of smells - the odors of history, in fact - and on the first page 18th-century Paris is anatomized into its component stinks. In its most fetid spot, beside a mephitic cemetery and beneath a fish stall, the hero of ''Perfume,'' Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born. But the point, the miraculous point, is that he has no smell at all. He is an orphan whose absence of body odor turns him, also, into an outcast - both damned and blessed, pariah and magician.

Grenouille himself is haunted by smells. He recognizes the odors of separate stones and of the varieties of water; he can locate even the most tremulous perfume from miles away; he can separate the simplest stench into its various elements - that of a human being, for example, being composed of cat feces, cheese and vinegar. As a child and young man, he survives as an outsider only through some stubborn instinct - deciding ''in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice'' -but this means that in 18th-century France, in an age of ''reason'' and a time of ''progress,'' he is a barbaric intruder. For him, this is a world stripped bare of its more elegant trappings and organized around the one fundamental principle of smell. 

As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brillance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

If you don't have time for the book,the movie is pretty accurate,less details,but still one worth seen it.