Articles

Patrick Suskind: “Perfume” and Jean-Baptiste Grenouille

ABSTRACT

Patrick Süskind’s novel “Perfume”, by a renowned representative of modern German literature, is one of the most widely read original works in the world and has been translated into many languages. The novel “Perfume” is regarded as a product of the postmodern literary movement. In the article, the events in Patrick Süskind’s novel “Perfume” and its main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, are discussed. In doing so, descriptive, observational, and comparative methods are employed. That is, the events in the novel are described, comparisons are made with other works and characters, and observations, generalizations, and contrasts related to the topic are presented. The article also focuses on the events in Patrick Süskind’s life and their impact on his works, including ideas that explain the postmodern movement. Moreover, the plot and the protagonist of the work are compared with those of other works from Azerbaijani and world literature; in the context of murdering people in pursuit of an idea born from a deranged imag-ination, Grenouille is compared to Raskolnikov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), and the depiction of the emergence of a bizarre, human-skinned creature heralded by a nauseating birth in a sordid set-ting and attributed to its mother’s murder is likened to the messages conveyed by Mirza Jalil while describing the character of Khudayar Bey in “The Loss of the Donkey”.

KEYWORDS

Patrick Süskind, novel, Grenouille, perfume, postmodernism