Empathy from the Impossible

I interviewed award-winning novelist Julia Glass (to read that interveiw, scroll down to "Writing on the Web"), and among the many illuminating things she said about writing, one thing in particular has stuck with me: "To my mind, this is the greatest power of fiction: to teach us empathy where we could not have dreamed it possible."

Naturally, that set me thinking about the books I've read in which this magical transformation happens. Patrick Suskind's Perfume (Knopf, 1986) was the first to come to mind. Suskind paints a dark and utterly sympathetic picture of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with an "exquisite nose," and "phenomenal memory," a man who is so utterly controlled by his sense of smell that he goes about murdering women for their scent, alone. Sounds diabolical, doesn't it?

But we get glimpses into Grenouille's tortured infancy in a fetid 17th-century world--a world where the stench of decay is constantly assaulting the faculties of normal people--but not his. And already, he is hated for being different.

And there's this, from the book, just after he murders his first young woman: "He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted aboninations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the vortex of their chaotic souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him. It was clear to him now why he had clung to life so tenaciously, so savagely. He must become a creator of scents. And not just an average one. But, rather, the greatest perfumer of all time."

From these few words and what came before, the reader is already helplessly sympathetic to this man, this murderer. Suskind has done his work well (as did John E. Woods, who translated this novel from the German). This is more than "loving evil." It's seeing past the evil into the motivations of it. This is where understanding begins to germinate. And in a world like 17th-century Paris--or 21st-century America--the need for understanding each other better cannot be underrated.

Glass is oh-so-right.