Kurt Cobain reportedly read Patrick Süskind’s tale of a serial killer born without body-scent but gifted with hypersomia (an exceptional sense of smell) around ten times in his short life. Cobain felt that re-reading the novel help him deal with hypochondria and joked that he’d had to start borrowing ideas from literature as he was beginning to run out of fresh ones of his own. That’s hardly fair, of course, as the strange, disturbing themes at play here mesh perfectly with the abstruse content of In Utero and weirdly reflect the grunge icon’s own disconnect from society. The book, originally published in German, deals with the titular perfume apprentice ‘collecting’ the exceptional natural perfumes of certain young women and certainly makes for a fascinating read.
It was turned into a very hard to find movie. It's actually pretty intense and stars Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman. It's called 'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer."
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