It’s a useful handicap for Süskind to have, as it prevents critics from inserting him into any one school of thought. When he does speak, he seldom comments on his literary persona and claims to have such a poor memory that he can’t recall what he has read. Süskind has only allowed four interviews throughout his career (and the only English-language one I could find was with the New York Times in 1986 ). Despite its success, Perfume was the only novel the writer ever published. Translated into over 49 languages, to date Perfume has sold over 20 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling German novels of the twentieth century. Perfume stayed on bestseller lists for nine years, elevating Süskind to international prominence as the most widely-read German writer since Thomas Mann. The novel came out in 1985, and in 1987 it won both the PEN Translation Prize and the World Fantasy Award (beating out Stephen King’s It ). )įor the second installment of Sellouts, we’re hopping a flight to eighteenth-century France, the setting of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. (And if you’re not caught up, check out our piece on Erich Segal’s Love Story. Welcome back to Sellouts: 50 Years of Bestsellers, the feature where we pore over the best most popular fiction in America from the last half-century, one year at a time.
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