Posted by Cheryl
on
24 June 2011
L’odeur est un mot, le parfum est la littérature / Odor is a word, perfume is literature (7). In brief entries dating October 29, 2009 to October 13, 2010, Journal d’un Parfumeur reveals a year in the life (or, rather, the mind) of perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, and celebrates the connections between language, contemplation and perfumery. Ellena offers a selective self-portrait via bright anecdotes, thoughtful vignettes and philosophical musings, blended with a hearty dose of opinion and a splash of high-brow name-dropping. Places and dates anchor the journal entries, along with brief titles, many of which would would make terrific perfume monikers: Plaisir; Nébuleux; Juxtaposition Toujours la menthe; Classique; Clin de nez; Bill Evans; Bricolage; Moleskine; and Shazam (yes, as in the iPhone app, and yes, related to identifying smells on the streets of Paris).
It turns out that language plays a vital role in Ellena’s creative process as well. Le nom est un son qui doit accrocher tous vos sens, il est le premier contact avec le parfum / The name is a sound that must capture all the senses; it is the first contact with the perfume (40). Describing works in progress — perfume formulae that may never be produced — Ellena explains that names help him to organize and track his creations. Féminin H, Vétiver de Calèche, Cuir de Bel Ami, and Fleur de Porcelaine could have been assigned numerical codes, but only words hold keys to each perfume’s histoire (which fittingly means both history and story in French). My favorite of these draft names, Eau de mandarine bleue, evokes Surrealist writer Paul Eluard’s poem, “The earth is blue like an orange…”
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Posted by Cheryl
on
18 February 2011
I am not a great fan of coffee-table perfume books, and this one reached me almost by chance. A late bloomer in many ways, I’ve just recently discovered Guerlain’s 1889 Jicky, and realized that for me “the history of Guerlain” signifies little more than how and where I’ve sniffed and chatted: at the Champs Élysées mother ship; at Saks Fifth Avenue in Boston; on the perfume sites. So, pulling my nose away from my precious Jicky sample, I endeavored to bury it in instead in a book on this historic house. In one distracted click, I ordered the least expensive of the lot: $22.00 used. Imagine my surprise when this 13.4 x 9.8 x 0.8-inch, hardcover book reached my doorstep in perfect condition.
Now, coffee-table books are not created to be read cover-to-cover, but for you, Fragrant Readers, that’s precisely what I’ve done. In the first chapter, on the founding of Guerlain in the 19th century, Colette Fellous links trends in perfumery to the cultural currents that flavored emerging modernist movements in literature, music, the visual and performing arts. The Jicky chapter presents this daring scent composition as an aesthetic bridge to the 20th century. Fellous argues convincingly that this strange, new blend, which does not imitate a natural bouquet, reflects the artist’s attempts to control nature, as expressed in works such as Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 Against Nature (À Rebours). Subsequent chapters (there are six in all), complete an unabashedly Guerlainophilic history of French perfumery, chock-full of tributes to the house classics…
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Posted by Cheryl
on
28 January 2011
The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume reframes the story of Coco Chanel through a carefully filtered lens. Tracing the classic perfume to childhood smells and later personal olfactory experiences, Tilar Mazzeo shows that all roads in Coco Chanel’s life led to No. 5. The bottle design itself, even the perfume’s name, have deep connections to the designer’s past. Especially influential were the clean, austere aesthetics of the Aubazine Abbey, where the orphaned Gabrielle (a.k a. Coco) was raised. As a result of this clever spin, the book reads as a sort of symbiotic biography of the person and her perfume. Together they weather the storms of love, war, and business.
Throughout the narrative, Mazzeo weaves smooth transitions to clearly written lessons on the history of perfumery and ingredients, including a final chapter (“The End of Modern Perfumery”), on increased restrictions on materials imposed by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA, the perfume industry’s self-regulatory organization), a real threat to perfume formulation as we know it.
One of the book’s premises is that myths have been perpetuated about the perfume’s provenance and reception; even the quotes that preface the volume serve to set the record straight…
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Posted by Cheryl
on
26 November 2010
People assume that I’m only kidding when I advocate the publication of a scratch-and-sniff version of Melville’s Moby Dick, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Proust’s Combray, or Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Au contraire! I am ready and willing to develop olfactory editions of great literary works. Notice I say olfactory editions. Use of the low-brow scratch and sniff — or worse — scratch ‘n’ sniff — could not possibly advance my cause with academic publishers. And odorama will be forever linked to the glorious king of kitsch, John Waters, who has riffed on the idea of his own celebrity perfume, cleverly named Eau de Waters, “the smell of an obsessed film fanatic.”1 Another earnestly eccentric social observer, Honoré de Balzac, came very close to coining odorama in his novel Père Goriot (1835). There characters fling “-orama“ wordplay across the table (corn-orama, soup-orama, health-orama, death-orama), while dining in one of French fiction’s smelliest boarding houses. Its sticky, rancid, musty, scullery-and-hospital reek, “charged by the catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger living there,” certainly merits the term, along with a place of honor on an odorama sniff card.
There are loads of scratch-and-sniff books for children, and even for the dog who has everything (See Spot Smell). But the selection of fragrance-enhanced reading for grown-up humans remains slim. And buyer, beware. A search for adult olfactory literature will turn up some seedy stuff. Not campy, self-aware seedy; just boorish, irony-deficient seedy…
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Posted by Cheryl
on
18 October 2010
In Remembering Smell, Bonnie Blodgett interlaces her own frightening story of smell loss with a primer on the olfactory system and olfactory disorders of all kinds, from phantosmia to anosmia. Her title foreshadows the many connections between smell and memory explored in the book. Part personal memoir, part investigation of the relationship between smell and brain function, the book also offers an elegy or memorial to the lost sense of smell.
Instead of posting a review this month, I invite you to join in an on-line book club.
To get you started, I’ll begin with a few topics and questions that came to mind as I was reading. Feel free to ask your own questions and to open up new topics…
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