Perfume

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading and discussion of Patrick Süskind's Perfume. We hope they will provide you with a variety of approaches to this vividly imagined historical novel. Set in eighteenth-century France, Perfume explores the evolution of a remorseless killer during an era of intense contradictions, an age in which poverty, filth, and superstition coexisted uneasily with the Enlightenment's ideals of progress, liberty, and reason.