Grenouille, the orphan, is passed between wet nurses. The baby is found alone in the street covered in flies and offal, while his mother is executed on charges of infanticide. She gives birth to Grenouille at a market stall among rotting fish guts and the stench of corpses, using a knife to cut the umbilical cord. His mother lost four children before him, all stillborn, and although only in her mid-twenties, is ravaged by gout, syphilis, consumption, and the loss of hair and teeth. Set amid the squalor and barbarity of 18th-century France, Grenouille finds himself in a world where he is unloved, forsaken and feared for his apparent supernatural abilities. It just effects me.”įirst published in 1985, Perfume follows the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is born with an extraordinary sense of smell and disgust for humanity. “It’s like something that’s just stationary in my pocket all the time. “I’ve read Perfume about ten times and I can’t stop reading it,” he told interviewer Erica Ehm. The book’s cover featured a naked woman, perhaps sleeping, perhaps dead, her long arm draped over an old bed-Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.Ĭobain had kept the novel near him on tour. Backstage, Cobain sat silently, surrounded by nests of cables, guitar cases and a strange book. He and his bandmates, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, had just played to their largest ever crowd-110,000-in a show that is infamous for Cobain’s unhinged performance he bungled chords, spat in the face of TV cameras, smashed a watermelon over the strings of his Fender Jaguar and simulated masturbation. His t-shirt, soaked in sweat, clung to his thin frame, and his ashy complexion revealed a struggle with addiction, fame and his own psyche.
Shortly before midnight on January 16, 1993, Nirvana’s frontman Kurt Cobain staggered offstage at São Paulo’s Hollywood Rock Festival and slumped into a chair, head thrown back, pupils constricted.
0 kommentar(er)
