|
Lyrical and analytic, harrowing and hilarious, a page-turner and a philosophical inquiry, Chandler Burr's THE EMPEROR OF SCENT employs its juxtapositions to jolt the reader's mind like a whiff of smelling salts. It snaps you into an amplified state of consciousness.
At its most superficial level --- which would have been, in itself, deep enough to make for a satisfying book --- THE EMPEROR OF SCENT is Burr's chronicle of several years in the life of Luca Turin, a London-based, Italian-born scientist obsessed with the sense of smell. Turin, a rumpled character of Dickensian eccentricity, has both scientific and aesthetic fascinations with scent. On the verge of proving a groundbreaking (and likely Nobel-worthy) theory that combines biology, chemistry and physics to explain how smell works, Turin also publishes a lushly poetic --- and deeply personal --- guide to commercial perfumes. This is a man who can think of scents in terms of "7-transmembrane G protein receptors" but then goes on to analogize them to the sounds of a Beethoven string quartet or "the smell of liquid summer sunlight." Such a comprehensive intellect, readers will discover, provokes enormous discomfort in a cutthroat business and scientific landscape where many little hills have allowed for many little kings.
Like Luca Turin, Chandler Burr, whose work on this book began as science journalism for The Atlantic, has the sort of voracious curiosity that makes him resist approaching his subject from a single angle. THE EMPEROR OF SCENT follows curlicued tangents into the academic politics that surround scientific publishing, the ruthless competition between the small handful of corporations that creates the smells of everything from toilet paper to Chanel No. 5, and the psychological importance of scent.
The latter is addressed in one of the book's most poignant moments (yep, it's poignant too!), in which Turin discusses being upset at the alteration of classic perfumes: "When the big fragrance firms take L'Air du Temps and wreck it by having an accountant redraw the formula to take out the expensive ingredients and substitute cheap ones, what they are doing…is depriving thousands of people throughout the world of the thrill of the memories that are infused with L'Air du Temps, because unless it is the same smell, it won't trigger."
Burr and Turin make for a perfect pairing of author and subject. Just as Turin's boundary-transcending insights connect traditionally segregated realms of academic research, Burr's writing deftly blends marvelously clear explanations of complex science with gripping descriptions of emotional drama and sensual delight. This dynamic duo weaves superficially disparate strains of information and impulse to create wonderfully coherent wholes. And they do it with ballsy panache. Here's Burr, after a more technical explanation, cleverly summarizing cyclopentadienyl-metal tricarbonyl molecules for lay readers: "They were basically molecular hamburgers, the two five-Carbon rings like buns with burgers of the various metal atoms slapped in between…The nickel burger had a nasty chemical oily smell."
Here's Turin talking about nature versus nurture in the human perception of smell: "France is a country that understands…the range of smells that makes life interesting includes some rather severe ones…When they smell [Soumantrain, a particularly pungent cheese], Americans think 'Good God!' The Japanese think, 'I must now commit suicide.' The French think 'Where's the bread?'"
Like a nickel-Soumantrain cheeseburger, THE EMPEROR OF SCENT is feast for interdisciplinary thinkers.
--- Reviewed by Jim Gladstone
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
