"For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they couldn't escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who couldn't defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men." 
 I wanted to read this book for the longest time, due to my love for the movie. I finally got around doing it and let me tell you, I was not disappointed. 
 Perfume is a beautifully written novel about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the ingenious man who was blessed with a superior sense of smell- although he is also the only human being who doesn't have a scent of his own. Grenouille struggles to find a place in a world that barely recognises his existence- the lack of personal odour makes him invisible in our scent-dominated world. We spend our lives in the midst of billions of different scents, most of which we ignore. But some of them are connected with our memories, they are irrevocably engraved in our souls ; the savour of a loved one, of rainy lazy days, of cold nights by a fire. How can a man, who smells of nothing, find a place in a world like that? How can he leave his mark in the hearts of the people around him? Perfume is not a story of a murderer; It is the story of a naive boy who tried to make people love him- until he understood that being loved for something you are really not, is even worse than living in the shadows. This book is not fantasy, although it might sound as such ; Grenuille's search for the perfect perfume symbolises our quest for an identity that would make us socially acceptable. And sometimes we forget, just like Grenuille did, that what really matters is not the approval of hundreds of people, but to accept ourselves for what we truly are. This is why, although Jean-Baptiste is characterised several times as evil, as an abomination and although he commits multiple murders, the reader can't help but sympathise with him; After all, how many sacrifices have we made in order for people to like us and how much have they altered our personalities?