Tag Archives: books

Perfume in Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”

15 Thursday Aug 2019

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I’m rereading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (in order to fix it in my mind before the movie adaptation is released next month), and I just stopped to savor this sentence:

“After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, [Hobie] taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents — ‘sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff’ — spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood.”

Donna Tartt is a secret (or not-so-secret?) scent-obsessive…

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Perfumed Pages: Ali Smith, “Autumn”

13 Thursday Jun 2019

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Thanks to my friend A., who always makes excellent book recommendations, I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s cycle of seasonal novels—Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), and Spring (2019). (I just finished Winter and I’m waiting for a copy of Spring to become available at the public library!)

In Autumn, the character Daniel Gluck, a 101-year-old former songwriter who’s nearing death, drifts into a reverie or dream populated by loved ones from his century-plus on earth. His imagined company includes:

“…the painter, the one that turned him copiously down, well, that’s life, he can even smell the scent the painter wore, Oh! de London, bright, sweet, woody, when he first knew her, then she got older and more serious and it was Rive Gauche, he can smell it too.”

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A Few Scented Lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

31 Friday May 2019

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In honor of the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth!

 

2.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself and I know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

 

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), excerpt from “Song of Myself”

Perfumed Pages: Joan Didion, “Goodbye To All That”

28 Tuesday May 2019

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Joan Didion (undated)

“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

I just finished reading Joan Didion’s classic essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which I’ve been meaning to read for ages and recently received in a Boxwalla subscription.

I noticed a few few smell-related references in one essay—“Goodbye to All That,” her 1968 reflection on loving and leaving New York City. Didion lived in New York from 1955, when she won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle, to 1963, at which point she moved back to her home state of California with her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.

Here are those references, with added commentary of my own…

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Perfumed Pages: Virginia Woolf’s Birthday

25 Thursday Jan 2018

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Woolf in 1927

January 25 is Virginia Woolf’s birthday—she was born in 1882 and died in 1941, leaving us a body of work that’s still essential reading.

Woolf herself was known to dislike perfume, as I’ve learned from Catherine Maxwell’s Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. However, she was keenly sensitive to scent in the natural world. A few years ago, Victoria of Bois de Jasmin wrote a post about Woolf in 2014 that includes a beautiful smell-related quotation from Mrs. Dalloway; you can read it here.

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Perfumed Pages: “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving”

23 Thursday Nov 2017

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“November had come; the crops were in, and barn, buttery, and bin were overflowing with the harvest that rewarded the summer’s hard work. The big kitchen was a jolly place just now, for in the great fireplace roared a cheerful fire; on the walls hung garlands of dried apples, onions, and corn; up aloft from the beams shone crook-necked squashes, juicy hams, and dried venison—for in those days deer still haunted the deep forests, and hunters flourished. Savory smells were in the air; on the crane hung steaming kettles, and down among the red embers copper saucepans simmered, all suggestive of some approaching feast.”

— Louisa May Alcott, “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving” (1882)