What is it: A copy of Denise Hamilton’s new novel, Damage Control.
How do I get it: For a chance to win, leave a comment telling me that you live in the US. Plus, tell us about the last time you read something about perfume in a novel or spotted a bottle of perfume in the movies. Or just tell us the last great book you read or movie you saw.
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The Little Book of Perfumes: The Hundred Classics by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez is now available for pre-order at the major online bookstores (delivery around 10/27)…
When I cracked open the novel Damage Control, I knew I’d have some good reading ahead. The dedication began, “This one’s for the perfumistas.” Add that the book’s author, Denise Hamilton (shown above right), is the Los Angeles Times’ fragrance columnist as well as a bestselling crime writer, and I was ready to call in sick and spend the day on the couch, book in hand.
Damage Control is about Maggie Silver, a budding perfumista and PR flack. She works for the Blair Company, a public relations firm that handles the big jobs. If a company wants word spread about its new potato chips, it can go elsewhere. The Blair Company steps in, for example, when a married governor knocks up his housekeeper then lives a double life with the resulting love child, or when a similarly married governor professes to have found his soul mate in South America.
In Damage Control, a senator’s aide is found murdered in circumstances that don’t reflect well on the senator. Maggie Silver is assigned to his case. The complication is that Maggie was good friends with the senator’s daughter, Annabelle, until Annabelle was sexually assaulted when they were teens. Maggie’s relationship with Annabelle was borderline obsessive — Annabelle had the cultured, coddled life Maggie desired (not to mention the mother with the bureau stocked with Guerlain Vol de Nuit). Covering this case means Maggie must deal with past as well as current puzzles…
L’odeur est un mot, le parfum est la littérature / Odor is a word, perfume is literature (7). In brief entries dating October 29, 2009 to October 13, 2010, Journal d’un Parfumeur reveals a year in the life (or, rather, the mind) of perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, and celebrates the connections between language, contemplation and perfumery. Ellena offers a selective self-portrait via bright anecdotes, thoughtful vignettes and philosophical musings, blended with a hearty dose of opinion and a splash of high-brow name-dropping. Places and dates anchor the journal entries, along with brief titles, many of which would would make terrific perfume monikers: Plaisir; Nébuleux; Juxtaposition Toujours la menthe; Classique; Clin de nez; Bill Evans; Bricolage; Moleskine; and Shazam (yes, as in the iPhone app, and yes, related to identifying smells on the streets of Paris).
It turns out that language plays a vital role in Ellena’s creative process as well. Le nom est un son qui doit accrocher tous vos sens, il est le premier contact avec le parfum / The name is a sound that must capture all the senses; it is the first contact with the perfume (40). Describing works in progress — perfume formulae that may never be produced — Ellena explains that names help him to organize and track his creations. Féminin H, Vétiver de Calèche, Cuir de Bel Ami, and Fleur de Porcelaine could have been assigned numerical codes, but only words hold keys to each perfume’s histoire (which fittingly means both history and story in French). My favorite of these draft names, Eau de mandarine bleue, evokes Surrealist writer Paul Eluard’s poem, “The earth is blue like an orange…”
I am not a great fan of coffee-table perfume books, and this one reached me almost by chance. A late bloomer in many ways, I’ve just recently discovered Guerlain’s 1889 Jicky, and realized that for me “the history of Guerlain” signifies little more than how and where I’ve sniffed and chatted: at the Champs Élysées mother ship; at Saks Fifth Avenue in Boston; on the perfume sites. So, pulling my nose away from my precious Jicky sample, I endeavored to bury it in instead in a book on this historic house. In one distracted click, I ordered the least expensive of the lot: $22.00 used. Imagine my surprise when this 13.4 x 9.8 x 0.8-inch, hardcover book reached my doorstep in perfect condition.
Now, coffee-table books are not created to be read cover-to-cover, but for you, Fragrant Readers, that’s precisely what I’ve done. In the first chapter, on the founding of Guerlain in the 19th century, Colette Fellous links trends in perfumery to the cultural currents that flavored emerging modernist movements in literature, music, the visual and performing arts. The Jicky chapter presents this daring scent composition as an aesthetic bridge to the 20th century. Fellous argues convincingly that this strange, new blend, which does not imitate a natural bouquet, reflects the artist’s attempts to control nature, as expressed in works such as Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 Against Nature (À Rebours). Subsequent chapters (there are six in all), complete an unabashedly Guerlainophilic history of French perfumery, chock-full of tributes to the house classics…