Book Review: "The Lower River" by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux has been a favorite writer of mine for a long time. I didn’t realize until I started writing about fragrance that he is more aware of the olfactory sense than any other writer I know. I’ve featured his smell-centered prose before. This quote comes from his new novel, The Lower River. 

The main character, Ellis Hock, is an American businessman who once served in the Peace Corps. As his life at home begins to unravel, he returns to his old African village, thinking he’ll be able to regain the sense of purpose he had there as a younger man. Theroux describes Hock's arrival in the nearest large town:

“The air was dense and hot, woven of many odors, and just a whiff brought it all back. He was walking down Hanover to Henderson, to the corner of Laws, to the bookshop, where he’d caught a glimpse of the sign Office Supplies. The countryside, so close, penetrated the town. You could not see the bush from the main street, but you could smell it: the wood smoke floated past the shops and seeped into the brick and stucco, the peculiar hum of scorched eucalyptus, the dustiness of dead leaves, the fields chopped apart by rusty mattocks to release the sharpness of bruised roots and red earth, all of it stinking ripeness and decay; and on every sidewalk the sweetish feet smell of the people, the sourness of their rags.”

Theroux, who was a Peace Corp volunteer in a similar time and place in his youth, writes with stinging authority. This modern sub-Saharan Africa is ravaged by AIDS and well-meaning relief organizations whose celebrity benefactors finance food drops from helicopters, humiliating the native people, who must scramble after it like animals. Much has gone wrong, and Hock’s idealism fades to a helpless passivity in the midst of it.

I found this book hard to read and equally hard to stop reading.  It’s new, and has already caused some controversy. Some have compared it to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For my purposes here, this — and all Theroux’s writing — is unusual in that it emphasizes the sense of smell, thereby giving the prose real immediacy and power. 

The Lower River is available in all the usual places. The ISBN is 978-00547074650-0.

The illustration is taken from the books’s cover art, designed by Melissa Lotfy.

Book Review -- "Damage Control" by Denise Hamilton

“We’re the number that movie stars have on speed dial when they get caught buying heroin or transvestite hookers on the wrong end of Sunset….We tell clients whom to talk to, when to go to rehab, what emotions to show (remorse, sorrow, sincerity, guilt, humility).” — Maggie Silver, heroine of “Damage Control”

This is a terrific read. I’m not a mystery fan, particularly, as I think that so often the characters exist simply to move the plot along. These characters, though, are like real people, except that “real” hardly applies to them. They exist in a Los Angeles most of us will never experience or even see. These are the dwellers of hilltop homes with ocean views, entrance gates, and secrets.

Maggie Silver is an up-and-comer in the army of  highly paid servants, members of a large group — the lawyers, accountants, managers, trainers, personal assistants and many others — who protect the rich and famous, often from themselves. 

In an interview with Carolyn Kellogg of the L.A. Times, author Denise Hamilton says that she “wanted someone who’d be in that world and yet not of it.” That’s what Maggie Silver is. Once, at sixteen, she reinvented herself  (Encino, not North Hollywood; deceased father a golden-age screenwriter, not barfly) to be accepted by the gilded Paxton family after she became pals with their daughter, Annabelle. But she and Annabelle have been apart for many years, and now Maggie is a rising star at The Blair Company, a firm that does damage control. Annabelle’s father, a distinguished U.S. Senator, is in trouble. One of his assistants, a beautiful young woman, has been murdered. The tabloid press is circling him. So Maggie and the Paxtons meet again.

Lots of us in perfume circles are familiar with Denise Hamilton. She writes the perfume column of the L.A. Times, and pops up regularly on perfume sites and fora. The novel is peppered with familiar names -- Vol de Nuit, Sycomore, Chergui -- and rationalizations ("If it makes you feel rich as a duchess, keep it.") A classic scent even provides the final clue, which only Maggie, with her keen nose, would “get,” and she does. It’s fun, reading the perfume references, although the author has apparently realized that the perfume blogosphere is a small world, and uses them skillfully.

The real appeal of this book, at least for me, is its dead-on look at modern Los Angeles. Hamilton knows the territory; the downbeat surf culture she has called “surf noir” where, on certain beaches, used syringes and condoms are as common as kelp. But she also roams the immigrant neighborhoods in search of, say, Peruvian food and back-street thrift shops. Her own life includes a crushing mortgage on a crackerbox house in an iffy neighborhood, and caring for a mother recovering from cancer.  In other word, she needs her job. Needs to remain sharp so badly that she has a growing smart-drug addiction. So badly that, as she begins to realize that The Blair Company does more — a lot more — than simple PR to protect its clients, she tries to reason it all away. She, as an employee of Blair, is spawn of the sizzling 24-hour celebrity-worshiping culture that defines us now.

The first few chapters of “Damage Control” are Chandleresque in their description of this dark Los Angeles. They’re as good as anything I’ve ever read about the city. The rest of the book is devoted to Maggie’s unraveling the plot, in mystery-novel tradition, full of dialogue and subterfuge. I kept thinking about what a good movie this book might make. What meaty characters these are, all of them, from street-smart but troubled Maggie to blanked-out fortunate daughter Annabelle to Maggie’s shoulda-been-in-the-CIA boss Faraday to Mr. Blair himself, a self-invented P.R. Zen Holy Man that could only exist here and who, incidentally, serves Maggie civet cat-shit coffee — of course we in the know know what that is; the uninitiated will probably think Hamilton made it up.

So yeah, get this book. I think you’ll all like it.

If you don’t mind receiving a used copy (with only one user: me) leave a comment by midnight US Eastern Daylight Time, Monday, October 17th. I’ll do a random drawing and announce the winner on Tuesday, October 18th.

Full Disclosure Time: This book was sent to me by a P.R. company working for the publisher, Scribner, after I answered an inquiry asking if I’d like to review it. “Damage Control” is out now and is available where books are sold, ISBN 978-0-7432-9674-8, and as an e-book (ISBN 978-1-4516-2789-3).

The image is a scan of the cover of “Damage Control,” jacket design by Chika Azuma and jacket photograph ©Allan Jenkins.

The Lantern -- Book Review

A month or so ago, Harper-Collins sent me a new novel, “The Lantern,” by Deborah Lawrenson, to review. The book is set in Provence, and a minor character becomes a perfumer. Hence sending review copies to perfume bloggers such as myself. I do appreciate the outside-the-box thinking that went into this. 

About the book itself: My opinion is mixed. It’s a gothic novel, not anything I’d usually read. But I do love good travel writing. Much of this book reads like it.

The narrative switches back and forth between Eve, a modern young woman who has fallen in love with a mysterious older man and followed him to a farm in Provence, and Bénédicte, daughter of the original farm family, now present only in spirit. It is Bénédicte’s sister, afflicted with congenital progressive blindness, who becomes the successful perfumer. 

As their idyllic summer fades to autumn, Eve begins to realize that she and her lover, Dom, are not alone in their ancient farmhouse. Past residents begin to make their presence known. As Eve’s veil of infatuation lifts with time, she becomes aware that Dom has a past, and a secret.

It is Bénédicte’s memories that form the sensual heart of the novel. Here she describes a late-summer day on the farm: “It was one of those days so intensely alive and aromatic, you could hear as well as smell the fig tree in the courtyard. Wasps hummed in the leaves as the fruit ripened and split; globes of warm, dark purple were dropping, ripping open as they landed with sodden gasps.”

The book is full of passages like this. I don’t think anyone I’ve read has described Provence in such a tactile and olfactory way. The problem here is one of characterization.

“The Lantern” is something like a modern action movie, long on effects and short on character development. We never really know the protagonist, Eve, or her lover, Dom. He is like a cardboard cut-out; just there, walking through the plot, playing his part. I never could work up much sympathy for Eve, either, who seems alternately petulant and nosy. It is Bénédicte, the ghost narrator, whose presence is most keenly felt and whose memories resonate. 

“The Lantern” is being marketed as similar to the Daphne du Maurier classic gothic story Rebecca. Somehow, I never read that. I’d like to now. There are similarities of course, gothic archetypes like the isolated protaganist, but the plot’s climax falls with a resounding thud -- all I could think was “That’s it? That’s the big dark secret?” Perhaps these all-too-modern characters simply don’t fit the gothic milieu well; perhaps that’s why Bénédicte’s wise presence saves the story, to some extent.

What is heartening about this book is the emphasis on the olfactory sense, usually ignored in fiction, and the writer's obvious love of classic fragrance. The expression “you could almost smell it” applies perfectly here, in Bénédicte’s beautiful descriptions of Provincial farm life.

“The Lantern,” from Harper-Collins, came out August 9^th. It’s available in the usual places. ISBN is 978-0-06-204969-8.

The image shown here is the cover of the advance reader’s edition. The “real” cover is slightly different.

Book Review -- “The Scent Trail (How One Woman’s Quest for the Perfect Perfume Took Her Around the World)” by Celia Lyttelton

I was surprised when I saw, on some book-buying site, a book about perfumery that I hadn’t ever heard of. I think that’s because this is a travel book, conceived, written and probably shelved in the “Travel” section, and it’s a great travel book.

The lucky Ms. Lyttelton, who is the daughter of archaeologist Margaret Lyttleton, grew up on the move, and now has no qualms about nosing around souks and asking impertinent questions. This is the perfect trip. Lyttelton spends two years investigating the ingredients she’s chosen for a bespoke perfume. At the beginning of the book, she meets with a custom perfumer, and they work out a fragrance for her. The ingredients she chooses are neroli, petitgrain, sambac jasmine, mimosa, damask rose, iris, nutmeg, vetiver, frankincense, myrrh and ambergris. 

“So I set out,” she writes, “for the places where these ingredients grow, to meet the people who harvest them and to discover at least some of the secrets of perfume making from the perfumers who ‘magic’ the raw ingredients into scent.”

Off she goes, husband, (sometimes) toddler and translators in tow, to mythical places like Grasse, Paris (where she talks with Frederic Malle), Morocco (where she talks with Serge Lutens), Florence, where the irises grow, Turkey for rose, India and Sri Lanka for jasmine and vetiver, and finally Yemen for frankincense and myrrh, and to search the island of Socatra’s beaches and souks for real ambergris.

This book came out in 2007, when Yemen wasn’t quite as dicey as it is now, although it was an uncommon destination for westerners. She speaks of having once gotten lost in the desert with her mother in that country and being rescued by Bedouins. Clearly, she’s comfortable wherever this trail leads.

Lyttelton makes some assumptions that aren’t always true (“once you’ve smelled something for the first time, the next time you encounter that smell you can immediately identify it”...uh, I can’t) and she also speaks of clearing the nasal palate with coffee beans, which is currently being disproved, but I’m splitting hairs here. (Can’t help but wonder what Sephora plans to do with all those beans, though.) She’s done her homework -- lots of it. 

“The Scent Trail” is a very entertaining book, full of primary information about how the natural ingredients for perfumes are obtained. She touches on the subject of synthetics, but not much -- things were a bit different when this book was being written (“Buddah,” she says, “is in, and boudoir is out” -- this before the tasteful Marc Jacobs/Tom Ford print ads, I assume.) What has happened since then, with the reformulations, the no-scent movement and the over-regulation of ingredients made reading about all this history and mystery a sad experience; I can’t help but think about what might have been, and what the perfume business has become -- all business. 

I’m increasingly grateful to the suppliers of these ingredients, because I’m not planning a trip to Yemen anytime soon (Paris maybe; one can always hope!), but know that if I really want a tiny bit of ambergris tincture or jasmine absolute, I can find them, and smell them and think about what she called “magic-ing” these storied raw ingredients into scents.

 Lyttelton credits the perfume she had made with tremendous power, to draw others closer, and, most importantly, to transport her to all the places she went to in her effort to understand this art. “My scent,” she says, “encapsulates distant lands, and its aromatic composition is filled with stories.” 

“The Scent Trail” is available in paperback. The ISBN is 978-0-451-22624-2.

The book’s cover design is by Oceana Gottlieb.

Off-Topic: Torn & Frayed -- Keef's Book

Ladies and Gentlemen:  Put your hand over your heart and tell me that you’ve never, ever wanted to be Keith Richards. 

“Life,” by the patron saint of Getting Away With It, is harrowing and funny and sort of, well, sweet. The back cover photo, which I think is Keith now, or Keith at least sometime in the last decade, isn’t exactly unretouched. But there is black dirt caked under the hero’s fingernails, and that kind of says it all.

My copy was delivered the day before last week’s snowstorm started, and so I got to spend a few days in Keith world. I came away from it with the impression of the artist, someone who, like Robert Johnson, seemed born to play. Yet he speaks of his grandfather Gus, a working-class bon vivant and musician, who bought a guitar and put it on top of his piano, so the grandson could see it;  just see it. No suggestions were made. No lessons were urged. One day the boy picked it up. 

Richards (and his collaborator, James Fox) knows what we want to hear about; the drugs, debauchery, the women traded around, and so on. He writes about all that all very matter-of-factly, and then suggests another book (Stanley Booth’s “True Adventures of the Rolling Stones”) for those who want to delve further. It's not his real interest. 

He recounts the early days, thusly: “We needed to work together, we needed to rehearse, we needed to listen to music….You we supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson….Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.” 

Success came relatively quickly to the Stones, a few of years of squalor and scuffle, and then “Satisfaction” hit big and worldwide. That opening riff -- Richards writes about how he dreamed it, sat up on the edge of the bed, played it into a cassette recorder, went back to sleep, and had no memory of it in the morning. It was delivered, like a gift. 

Richards gets all nerdy, as is his privilege, to tell us exactly and at length how he did it. How he filtered the black Delta blues and gave them back with a twist. Who he learned from. All his favorite obscure records. The exact mechanics of an open five string tuning. I’ve read some reviews that get a little impatient about all of this; obviously, if you’ve never played a guitar chances are it would bore you, but this is what he does. It’s his art. This work, not his other art: survival.

That art appears to be inborn, too. It seems that Keith only needs to sleep a couple of times a week. He’s set to 78 in a 33 1/3 world (look it up). It was this, he tells us, that led him to heroin. The need to come down to everyone else’s speed. To focus. To work; always, all about the work.

Well, ok; Keith, if you say so. He takes great pains to tell us: don’t try this at home. Everything he had, the coke, the smack, was “pure pure pure.” He attributes the fact that he’s still alive to that. Later on, after kicking for the last time, he calls heroin “the most seductive bitch on earth.” It was all true. And it was a good time. In that sense, he’s unrepentant, my favorite quality in this age of tearful guilty televised confessions and much-too-public oft-repeated P.R. generating rehabs. 

There is, though, a lot of sharing here, especially as concerns Mick: he misses his mate, he says, and then rips Mick a new one. I’ve always felt that the Stones greatest album, (imho) “Exile on Main Street,” came from tension between the two, with Mick being pulled into a sort of parasitic Continental aristocracy and Keith wanting to stay down and dirty. Well, ok, but anyone who’s ever had business or any other sort of dealings with a junkie might have a thing or two to say; we’ll see. In the meantime, the honesty here is appreciated, but here’s the thing. He’s an immensely rich and privileged rock star, and has been one for so long that he’s, um, a little out of touch. One of my favorite passages is when the bashful suitor goes to meet his fiance, Patti Hansen’s, family.

“….I’d been up for days. I had a bottle of vodka or Jack Daniel’s in my hand,

And I thought I’d just walk in the house with it….It was just a question of

getting the family blessing.”

(dinner commences, and one of the Patti’s sisters remarks that Keith may

be a little too drunk to play a particular song.)

“….bang. I went berserk….And smashed my guitar on the table. It could’ve

gone either way...I could have been banished forever, but the amazing thing 

about this family is that they weren’t offended.”

Well of course not! Isn’t that just adorable? The charmed Mr. Richards thinks it’s all just, well, normal!

Carry on, Keef. 

“Life,” by Keith Richards (with James Fox) is available wherever books are sold; ISBN 978-0-316-03438-8 (hc)

Photo of Keith Richards from Google Images.

Book Review: "Perfume" by Susan Irvine

I tend to do things backwards. For example, I flip through magazines right to left. In college, I often took upper division courses before the survey ones. I learned to cook from complicated recipes long before mastering the simple techniques that are the real building blocks of that art. It works for me, usually. So, the first book about perfume I read was Chandler Burr’s “The Emperor of Scent,” about Luca Turin and his vibrational theory of olfaction, complete with complicated molecular diagrams and lots of ten-dollar chemical names.

 I should’ve read this book first. 

“Perfume” came out in 1995. I have no doubt that many of you have already read it, but because it is an old book now, some may not have. If you haven’t, it’s worth the effort to track down a copy. Because if I was to suggest one book to perfume newbies, one volume that gives the reader a clear, comprehensive and accurate background, this would be the one. 

I’ve always thought that perfume and cultural anthropology walk in tandem. How could they not? Even in grade school, we were taught about the spice routes of ancient trade. This is where the book begins, with a generous nod at scent and the sacred. Various types of incenses were thought to alter consciousness, used in ritual much as psychedelic plants were also used as gates to the other world, whatever, wherever, that world might be. This simply obliterates so many modern cultures’ thinking about fragrance, that it’s all about the crass come-hither. Far from it!

Irvine explores the West’s nineteenth-century obsession with deodorization in a way that rings with echoes. A reaction to the licentiousness of the eighteenth and, to some extent, the seventeenth centuries; a pendulum swinging and then swinging back; a mania for sanitation and the concept of personal space, that invisible zone whose borders musn’t be breached, even by someone else’s scent -- sound familiar? And that what took a century then might take, oh, a mere thirty or so years now? 

This explains so much.

Without going through a list of chapter titles (see notes at the end of this post for those) I can tell you that much was finally clarified for me. For example, what is the exact difference between Rose de Mai and Rose Damascene? And, uh, ok, there IS such a thing as Florentine Iris -- I’d thought that was marketing-copy b.s.  How, exactly, is frankincense obtained? How do the various jasmines differ from the gold-standard Grasse jasmine? There is a clear, and fair, discussion of synthetics vs. naturals, and the fragrance families, too, with a fragrance “wheel” that (finally) makes sense.

Other topics are fashion, and how -- and why -- the visual world of the designer and the more mysterious olfactory world of the perfumer became so solidly linked in this century, and of the coutiers most influential (her discussion of Chanel is fascinating, in this light). How history became eclipsed by marketing, how fragrances are made, how they’re sold, how the “spin” came to be so much more important than the perfume itself; all true, perhaps more true now than ever before.

Ultimately, for me at least, it is her speculation about the future of this art that makes me feel a little sad. She speaks of “aromachology,” and how there seemed, at the time, to be a burgeoning of fragrance as a spiritual “mood-drug” for the masses, something like its use in the ancient world. Of possible innovations like scent delivered by skin patches activated by touch. Of biotechnologies used to recreate, and then produce cell-by-cell the scents of flowers or other essences. If any of this has come to pass, it’s news to me.

 But lots of things are, when I really look at it.

More than anything, this book humbled me. I’ve been studying and writing about fragrance and the fragrance arts for over two years, pretty obsessively at times, and there are still the big blank spots, things I probably should’ve known, and, guess what -- the inescapable conclusion: I’m still a noob. 

In a way I guess I’ll always be one, because this is a big, no, a monumental subject, incorporating art, science, history, spirituality, sociology, psychology, biology, business, fashion: you name it. It’s worthy of years of study. A lifetime of it.

In “Perfume,” not a single word is wasted.

“Perfume,” subtitled “The Creation and Allure of Classic Fragrances” was written by journalist Susan Irvine, and was originally released in 1995. The ISBN is 0517141590. A hint: it’s available from used book sites such as alibris and other online booksellers, for widely varying prices.

Here are the chapter titles: The Mystery of Perfume, Making Scents, Bottling Allure, Fragrant Fashion, The Sensual Sell, and The Scent of Things to Come.