What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert

decoys. Finally, he would have a profound ability to imagine odors and to anticipate how they would smell when mixed together.
    If such a person exists, science hasn’t found him. This doesn’t stop novelists from imagining characters endowed with superhuman ability. Take Grenouille, the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
Many people have recommended this book to me, thinking I would enjoy the depiction of Grenouille’s incredible olfactory powers, but I am not impressed. Where the Laing Limit keeps normal people from smelling more than four odors in a complex mixture, Grenouille is born with the ability to recognize dozens of them. Even if we buy this fantasy, how does it instantly make Grenouille the best perfumer in Paris? Analyzing a perfume isn’t the same thing as creating one. (I can hear every note in a Mozart symphony, but that doesn’t make me a composer.) We know that perfumers work from the top down; they first recognize a perfume’s type, and then the nuances that make it unique. Grenouille starts by cracking a perfume into its raw materials, the very opposite of how real perfumers work. As a fan of slasher films, I don’t mind that Grenouille is a repellent freak with no body odor of his own who murders female virgins to extract their body scent. Neither do fans of
Perfume
—they are so enthralled by the romance of essential oils and blending that they ignore Grenouille’s nasal necrophilia and the novel’s soul-deadening grimness.
Perfume
is about perfume-making the way
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
is about sausage-making.
    The novelist Salman Rushdie created a hero with supernormal olfactory power named Saleem Sinai, who is born with an enormous nose. The smelly passages in
Midnight’s Children
are fun to read even as they verge on the phantasmagorical. Here Rushdie conjures the smellscapes of Karachi, Pakistan:
    …the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal faeces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odours of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the knife-sharpness of expectorated betel and opium: “rocket paans” were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded alleys between Elphinstone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of contraband cigarettes and “blackmoney,” the competitive effluvia of the city’s bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers.
    Like Grenouille, Saleem Sinai comes from the land of make-believe. His olfactory ability goes far beyond normal experience: he uses it to detect emotions in other people, read their character, and peer directly into their souls. Similarly bizarre characters appear in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s
The Mistress of Spices
and Tom Robbins’s goofy burlesque
Jitterbug Perfume.
Why are the authors of magic realist fiction so fond of supersmellers? Transforming a “primitive” animal sense into an all-knowing form of perception is apparently an irresistible literary conceit. Whatever their entertainment value, fictional supersmellers don’t shed much light on real people.
    Busted
    I suggest that if the police really wish to know where stills and “speakeasies” are located, they take me with them. It would not be a bad idea for the United States Government to establish a bureau of aromatic specialists.
    —H ELEN K ELLER
    In April 2005, an Indiana man arrived at the Decatur County jail to bail out his brother-in-law. As he handed over $400 in cash, the dispatch clerk noticed that the bills reeked of marijuana. Police officers got the man’s permission to search his car. They found a pipe and some pot and charged him with possession. The episode has a certain Cheech-and-Chong quality to it, but the use of odor as evidence raises serious questions about the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. In February 1999, an Ohio