Novelists and the Nose
Scented fiction in the 21st century
Recently, quite by accident, I found a substack by Miccaeli, a fume head who lives on Australia’s eastern coast. She’s a fresh voice on fragrance and her work is worth a look. I don’t buy her take on some topics but that’s fine—it’s a big world.
Miccaeli’s latest post is Books to Build a Perfume Library in which she recommends a “starter pack” of books on scent and olfaction. Her selections are mostly big books about commercial perfume brands and if that’s your interest, it’s a reasonable list.
But it got me thinking: what about other categories of smelly books? I took a glance at my bookshelves and decided to start with recently published smelly novels.
Smell: A Novel, by Radhika Jha (2001)
I wrote about Jha’s novel in What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life. My topic was how the smells we are brought up with can create invisible cultural boundaries (the “fragrant fence”).
Does the fragrant fence limit us to the food aromas of our birth culture? Not necessarily; but there are hazards in jumping the fence. These are nicely depicted in Radhika Jha’s novel Smell. Leela, a young Indian woman born in Kenya, is sent to live with relatives who run an Indian grocery in Paris. Aromatic cross-currents are present from the opening sentence: “When the wind blew hard, as it did very often that spring, the smell of fresh baguette would fight its way into the Epicerie Madras to do battle with the prickly smell of pickles and masalas.” Leela has a fine awareness of scent and is skilled at cooking with traditional Indian spices. As she learns the ways of Paris she improvises new dishes and creates new possibilities for her love life and career. (She takes a French lover and becomes the darling of the Parisian fusion cuisine scene.) Eventually, Leela realizes that the scents that make her exotic and attractive also make her an outsider. As an author, Radhika Jha has an extraordinary feel for the boundary-creating power of scent, perhaps because she herself lived in Paris as an exchange student. By showing how one woman used scent to redefine her relation to two cultures, she proves it is possible to cross the Fragrant Fence.
The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent, by Denyse Beaulieu (2012)
This is not a novel, strictly speaking, but a novelistic memoir triggered by a romantic night under blossoming orange trees in Seville and Beaulieu’s subsequent work with perfumer Betrand Duchaufour to create a perfume based on the experience.
I blurbed it for the US edition:
Denyse Beaulieu is a keen observer, a thoughtful guide, and a graceful storyteller. The Perfume Lover enchants and seduces as effortlessly as it teaches and entertains.
Thirty-three Swoons, by Martha Cooley (2005)
The daughter of a dead master perfumer begins having weird dreams manipulated by a ghostly figure. It’s a complex and intricately plotted story in which scents play a key role. Well written, but for me it took a long while for the dream images to connect with the real-world plot, and by that point my interest was flagging.
The Book of Lost Fragrances, by M.J. Rose (2012)
I was offered an advanced reader copy of this novel and published a review of it on my old blog which you can read here. This work of historical fiction is chock-full of romance and reincarnation. While I respect M.J. Rose’s chops as a romance novelist, let’s just say that the genre is not my cup of tea and reading this volume left me feeling unsatisfied and slightly bloated.
The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister (2019)
This one I have not read and, based on this summary from the Amazon page, I don’t think I will. [You’re romance-fiction-phobic!—Ed.] [Yes. I am.]
Emmeline lives an enchanted childhood on a remote island with her father, who teaches her about the natural world through her senses. What he won’t explain are the mysterious scents stored in the drawers that line the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them. As Emmeline grows, however, so too does her curiosity, until one day the unforeseen happens, and Emmeline is vaulted out into the real world--a place of love, betrayal, ambition, and revenge.
The Scent of You, by Maggie Alderson (2017)
Another one that I have not read given my genre allergy. For what it’s worth, here is the Amazon summary:
Polly's life is great. Her children are away at uni, her glamorous mother -- still modelling at eighty-five -- is happily settled in a retirement village, and her perfume blog is taking off. Then her husband announces he needs some space and promptly vanishes.
As Polly grapples with her bewildering situation, she clings to a few new friends to keep her going -- Shirlee, the loudmouthed yoga student; Guy, the mysterious, infuriating and hugely talented perfumer; and Edward, an old flame from university.
And while she distracts herself with the heady world of luxury perfume, Polly knows she can't keep reality at bay forever. Eventually she is forced to confront some difficult truths: about her husband, herself and who she really wants to be.
The Century So Far
What are we to make of contemporary scented fiction in the 21st Century? It appears to be dominated by female authors and romance-driven narratives. A specialized knowledge of perfumery by the lead character seems to be de rigueur. I sympathize with the last item: a focus on scent almost requires that the protagonist have a special relationship to smell. In my Nick Zollicker short stories, the eponymous lead character knows the science of scent and is at home in the business of perfume. And while Nick has a robust interest in women, no one would mistake either story for romance fiction.
