Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (9 Hrs.): 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...Grenouille himself is haunted by smells....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...
