I understand why creating a perfumer protagonist is catnip for novelists. Perfume is glamorous, and the art of creating fragrance holds more mystery than, say, playing the cello. But so many novelists butcher perfumery. Often they portray noses as bloodhounds who can sniff a sprig of mint down the block, but they ignore the heart of creating a perfume — beautiful, effective composition.
In The Perfume Garden, Kate Lord Brown avoids this pitfall. Thank you, Brown, for not spending paragraphs having your perfumer heroine wax on about the smell of a carrot that was raised in a field fed by spring water run off through alfalfa fields where a gassy Doberman frolicked. On the other hand, there’s not much about perfume in The Perfume Garden at all. Although the heroine Emma Temple is supposed to be a world class perfumer, her interest in scent seems to stop at one character’s Acqua di Parma.
The Perfume Garden combines two stories, one set during the Spanish civil war and one in the early 2000s. Emma, our modern-day heroine, loses her perfumer mother and the father of her child at the same time. She moves to an abandoned house in Valencia that her mother bought. In renovating the house and meeting people in the neighborhood, she uncovers all sorts of family secrets — secrets told in the 1930s portion of the book.
The novel is loaded with lush language and drama. People get pregnant, lose limbs, fall in love, die in childbirth, pledge undying love, leave letters for survivors to find, discover hidden rooms and buried bones, and in one case converse with a ghost. It’s the sort of book that’s all emotion and sensual detail without a ton of wit. That’s okay, though — when you’re in the mood for melodrama backlit with dreamy description, this story will scratch that itch.
But if you’re looking for insight into the life of a perfumer or the creation of a fragrance, don’t bother. Although Brown inserts bits of perfume information — in one section, a character breaks into mini-monologue on harvesting orange blossom, for instance, and in another, one perfumer informs another perfumer that "like wine, some crops and some years are better than others" as if she doesn't know — for the most part the rare bits of perfume talk are mundane. We don’t see much about composition, other than a scene where Emma makes a fragrance inspired by her lover, and another nose, "the best in Spain," can’t figure out what that last ingredient is (spoiler alert: it’s ambergris, a material a perfumer would know like a cook knows salt).
But that’s about it. We learn nothing about the tiny tensions that make a scent gorgeous or about the modern perfume industry. At one point, Emma even explains that she doesn’t have enough room for enfleurage or distilling, as if a world renowned perfumer regularly gins up her own materials.
As for The Perfume Garden’s jacket copy proclaiming that the novel is a “…sensuously written story of lost love, family secrets, and the art of creating a perfect scent,” I’ll go with the “lost love” and “family secrets” part. For “the art of creating a perfect scent,” see Jean Claude Ellena’s Diary of a Nose.
The Perfume Garden is $24.99 in hardback or $11.99 in ebook by Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martins. (By the way, make sure you don’t accidentally click “buy” for The Perfumed Garden, unless you’re looking for erotica.)
Thanks for the review, Angela, but this definitely sounds like a pass for me. Sounds like the author didn’t *really* know much about perfume but thought it would make a good story.
Perfume isn’t central to the story, really. The protagonist could have been a florist, and the story would have been the same. I admire the author, though, for dipping her toes into the perfume world, even if her heroine doesn’t match up with the little bit I know about the perfume industry.
I wish I knew as “little” as you do!
And upon re-reading your review, the terms “dreamy narrative” and “Spanish Civil War” jumped out at me and made me wonder if the author was trying for a Shadow of the Wind?
I haven’t read Shadow of the Wind. Should I put it on my “to read” list?
Definitely, Angela! STILL one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was something like best international book of the year for 2004 (I think that’s the title and year). I have a Word document with quotes from it the writing was so good. But great story too.
Look here:
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3209783-la-sombra-del-viento
You flatter me!
I probably don’t do you justice, dear one. <3
You are a darling, and I’ll definitely look up Shadow of the Wind!
Snap!
Well, I imagine that for most of the rest of the world of romantic readers who are not fragrance crazy nuts like us, this will be a very pretty book. I like things a little more complicated, and with a little more wit, as you say.
Did you ever see the Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon and Jude Law? There is a great scene leading to Dickie’s murder. Jude Law is so perfect: “You bore me, you can be quite boring….boring…boring…”
I can hear that movie dialog drumming along behind your review of this book.
Write us a clever one!!!
Dang! Am I so transparent? I really didn’t want to come off as looking down my nose, because I read and love just about everything. Although I adore a good romance novel, some women’s fiction falls flat (how’s that for alliteration?) with me, mostly because of the “wit” factor. The author writes in a super dreamy, style, though, and I can imagine some people loving the novel for its descriptions of Valencia alone.
No, not transparent, effective subtext. Any good author should be good at that, right? And for the record, there’s no backtracking here. I profoundly dislike most modern and most women’s fiction, which makes it hard to be a librarian these days. The self-indulgence and lack of editorial controls is a huge pet peeve.
I did notice that on at least three separate occasions, the author had different characters express their awe by “letting a low whistle.” Stuff like that sticks in my craw when I’m feeling cranky. I would have thought an editor would have caught that.
You’re assuming the editor was intelligent enough to find a problem with the repetition! See? I’m old and generally cranky! :-p
I’m giving the editor the benefit of the doubt, since it’s a good publishing house and I’d assume they hire good people. But I’d be willing to bet the editors are busier than ever, too, given challenges in publishing these days.
And I bet even on your crankiest of days you’re still great company!
Ann, you’re a woman after my own heart.
Am I the only one who went whizzing over to check out The Perfumed Garden instead? (Turns out I read it long ago.)
We certainly have a “sophisticated” readership here at NST!
Goodness, who has room for enfleurage these days…
How would you go about writing a novel centred around a perfumer, Angela?
Well, given my own fiction proclivities, I’d probably make the perfume a central part of the narrative and have the perfumer make a POISONED PERFUME that would knock a person dead with a single whiff of “special” tuberose. HA HA HA. (Hopefully you imagined this read with the voice of the Joker from Batman.) Come to think of it, maybe I’d knock off whoever took Crepe de Chine off the market.
Hmm. A cosmetics exec gets whacked; a clue indicates that the motive could be related to the discontinuing of a fragrance. And there’s only one way to find the culprit — follow up whoever’s still wearing said fragrance. Could be a salvageable premise there.
Maybe the murderer is forced to give up Crepe de Chine forever lest she or he be discovered, and that his/her ultimate punishment.
Could be the story of a serial killer, too, or of a chain of copy-cat killers. So many discontinued fragrances – so many motives . . .
So true!
Was this intended as a pure love story? From the description of the plot, it sounded like it could have been about the Spanish Civil War and its impact on future generations.
I wouldn’t call it a love story, although love and relationships are the backbone of the narrative. It’s more of a story about how the Spanish Civil War brought a certain group of people together and tore them apart, and the repercussions that had on the next two generations.
Hi Angela, thanks for reading and reviewing this! Guess I’ll take a pass.
A friend and I were disagreeing recently about the merits of giving up on something we weren’t really enjoying vs. continuing to the end in order to give the creator the benefit of the doubt. Could be anything, really – a movie, book, cup of coffee, etc. – and I was in the first camp. One of my pet sayings lately is “life’s too short for bad ___.”
Which camp are you in? Would you have finished this book if you hadn’t known you would be reviewing it?
First, I should note that this book and the author have lots of fans over at Goodreads, and they’re a choosy crowd. So take what I say with a grain of salt–it’s just a matter of taste. But, no, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. I wouldn’t have bought it in hardcopy or at the ridiculous kindle price, but I would have put it on hold at the library. Then I probably would have got about 40 pages into it and turned it in the next day. I’m blessed with stacks of reading that I can’t wait to get to.
I guess I keep to your philosophy: Life’s too short for bad coffee, flabby wine, drinking out of styrofoam cups, cheap bras, and skimpy bathtubs!
I guess we’re on the same page, then. (Oops, no pun intended!)
Good one!
Aw … sounds fun, perfume or no. I applied the ‘local library’ test to this. If if my local library has it, great. If not, don’t bother. And they do have it, so I’m in! I’ll pick it up at the weekend.
I’m looking forward to ordering your latest Angela, now that it is in paperback. I was getting anxious!
I hope you enjoy the book! Isn’t the library the greatest? I’m there at least a few times a week. My latest thing has been to check out huge decorating tomes loaded with photos.
I hope you enjoy Slain in Schiaparelli!
I don’t want to be in a field of anything downwind of a gassy Doberman…..
Good review of this book. I can’t remember why I downloaded it onto my Kindle but anyway I did and read it all (prepostrous ending chasing round a bell tower?) but it annoyed me because it was so slight, especially in relation to the perfume side. I enjoyed the historical aspect better but I am fascinated by the Spanish Civil War anyway. Somebody asked if it was sort of similar to Shadow of the Wind – in my view – no. Shadow is a far superior piece of quite gothic fiction set around the time of the civil war. I would recommend reading Shadow but I wouldn’t recommend reading this (unless, as you say, lost love and family secrets are your thang and you’re on holiday and don’t want to concentrate too hard).
I’m glad to hear from someone who’s read the book! The Spanish Civil War bits were fascinating, it’s true. I think Shadows is probably worth a peek for me. Sometimes I really do love even classic gothic fiction–the “had I but known” type. Thanks for weighing in.
We finally watched The Grand Budapest Hotel over the weekend. Even the kids LOVED it. M. Gustav’s liberal applications of L’Air de Panache were delightful. My favorite fragrance use in fiction is where a character simply enjoys scent. I never read anything by Stefan Zweig, so I wonder if one of his characters would hoard “Panache?”
Thank you for the review! I too will pass, but not because of the misrepresentation of the craft of perfumery… Gothic is just not my cuppa.
I loved The Grand Budapest Hotel, too! I really need to watch it again, because I know I’d find so many more details to appreciate.
I wouldn’t call The Perfume Garden gothic, really–it’s more of a straightforward women’s fiction novel with a historical element. (It lacks the delicious wackiness of The Grand Budapest Hotel, though.)