This book is really short. The one I got is a little hardcover copy and it's about 80 pages and written in huge font with huge margins. But what little there is is great. One of my favorite things in Perfume is that scientist Grenouille runs into after coming out of the cave, and his theory about the earth emiting toxins, if you read the book you know what I'm talking about. I thought that was such fun and I would have loved to read more stuff like that. Well good ol' Suskind wrote another short story in the same spirit as that in this book about a scientist with a wild theory about shell fossils. It was my favorite in this collection. But another great one is the chess match. Yup that was a good one. Yup. This book is short. The other story and his reflection were good too. But they were short. Okay.

This is a wonderfully disturbing novel, full of magical circumstances and intricate historical detail. The language flows beautifully and it's a refreshing change from heavy standard-fare German literature. The detail is the main drawback of the book; Suskind gets bogged down in lengthy descriptions of scents and odors instead of flushing out the characters, some of whom are little more than flat cartoon figures. But then, that's what gives the book its magical air. So read it and enjoy!

I read the title and immediately bought it. It has excellent descriptions, uses an extraordinary language. You end up learning a lot of scents and about France scenary. There was a part were I actually wanted to be there, get inside the story to smell the wonderful parfum described. I also loved a part were it broke the chronological order to describe what was going to happen to a character who was never going to be mentioned again. I definitely recommend it to everyone. You'll end up trying to get the scent of everything!!

I have read this book and was immediately fascinated with its style of language and the viewpoint on normal - meaning smelling - people. A creature, left as an orphan in front of a monastery, grows up in Paris' low class society. People avoid him, not knowing, that the reason for their aversion is his absolutely scentless body. His quest then becomes to become human and to create his own body odor by "stealing" it from beautiful young girls in Paris. How he does that and what happens is one of the major events in the book. It has to fascinate everyone that wishes to get to know the world of a completely clever, instinctive, and sometimes animalistic being. I strongly recommend this book to all of you - it is definitely one of my favorites!!!

If this tour de force were a short story, part of a collection, I'd have liked it better. It's too light-weight to take seriously as a separate publication. Jonathan Noel, the main character, is a timid and tidy man who has lived in the same 11 x 7 room for thirty years. One morning he opens the door to his room and finds a pigeon sitting there. This leads to total disruption in his predictable life, his personal unraveling, and his decision to live elsewhere for a few days. If you can identify with this, you are a better person than I!

Located in contemporary Paris, "The Pigeon" is the story of an incident. A dull Frenchman discovers one day the unexpected presence of a pigeon in front of the small roomm he inhabits. This minuscule and seemingly irrelevant event adopts terrifying proportions in the mind of the man, becoming a grotesque nightmare.

As a master of allusion and obsession, Suskind reveals once more, in this parable of everyday life, his gift for building a metaphor of the existential background of humans. It shows that our life usually holds to rutines so fragile, that a simple disturbance may force us to rethink everything from the start. It is a short book, but an intriguing and absurd tale. The absurd, seems to say Suskind, is present in the most simple things that happen every day.

Imagine you are an old man so afraid of life that you have spent most of your years alone, living in a small room and working in an insignificant job as a security guard on the front steps of a bank, your only pleasure somehow derived from the monotony of your daily routine. Then one day a living creature, a pigeon, appears unexpectedly on your doorstep, and it shouldn't be there--it is out of place. And this frightens you like nothing has in many years. You flee your apartment (for good, you think). Because of your agitated state you break your own routines; you begin acting strangely, and your perceptions alter. This sets off a chain reaction of encounters in which you, despite your lifelong precautions to the contrary, begin interacting with a world that seems determined to drive you over the edge.

Suskind's "The Pigeon" is subtly meticulous in depicting its protagonist's complex psychological journey. The story is at once free of sentimentality, raw, honest, and yet life-affirming in the most vital sense. While it is reminiscent of Kafka and--most notably--of Knut Hamson's "Hunger," Suskind's novella also manages to glimpse something just around the corner, something almost out of sight, beyond the valley of despair.