THE PERFUME THIEF

Nightlife goes on in Schaffert’s ornate tableau of Nazi-occupied Paris.

Schaffert’s narrator, Clementine, is presumably in her 70s, though she’s not talking. A Nebraska native, Clem is self-described as queer and has long preferred the persona of a dapper dandy. Settling in Paris after a long history of thievery in the United States, and one monumental and disappointing love affair with another person known only as M, she dares not return to the U.S., where too many warrants await. In France, she exploits her other signature talent, perfumery. Her chief competitor, Pascal, has disappeared, which is no surprise since Paris has been seized by the Nazis and Pascal is Jewish. Pascal’s Left Bank hôtel particulier now bivouacs aging Nazi kingpin Voss, who, as a member of the old guard, clings desperately to his rank. Zoé, Pascal’s daughter, sings torch songs incognito in a cabaret attached to a bordello. Lush description of scents and extravagant lists of everything from butterflies to poisons underscore Clem’s prodigious powers of observation, but the novel’s beautifully rendered atmosphere is no substitute for suspense and conflict. The aesthete Voss and the loutish but lovelorn Lutz, whose unwilling mistress Zoé becomes, are not particularly menacing though they're Nazis, and the terrors of the Occupation—the dispossession and removal of the city’s Jews, the hunger, the cruelty of the occupiers and the co-optation of the occupied—are mostly offstage. There are nods to the Resistance—but even here, misplaced whimsy obtains: for example, tobacco-scavenging nuns branch out into helping prostitutes flee south, disguised in habits. In what passes for an overarching plotline, Voss and Clem form an uneasy alliance to ferret out Pascal’s hidden perfumer’s diary as part of a double-cross which begins as fanciful and ends as anticlimactic. For most of the novel, Clem, her young protégé Blue, and her friend Day, also a chanteuse, seem to be enjoying themselves far too much for the setting.

A discordantly frothy vision of Paris’ darkest chapter.