The main character in the novel – Jean Grenouille – was born without a scent, which made people mistrust him. But only recently the two were connected in my mind. And I read it when I was about 15, three years after I first heard Cobain sing about a ‘scentless apprentice’. Of course that made me even more curious. I bought the Nirvana album a few years before my father explicitly forbade me to read ‘The Perfume’ by Patrick Süskind (1985), which I had discovered on a shelf in the living room. Only much later I found out this song referred to a novel I hadn’t heard of at the time. SCENTLESS APPRENTICE (In Dutch that would be ‘geurloze leerling’) I clearly remember my father translating the title of the second song on the album for me (I was too young to fully understand English): The first album I ever bought was ‘In Utero’ by Nirvana.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |