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The Emperor of Scent
Cover of The Emperor of Scent
The Emperor of Scent
A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses
Borrow Borrow
For as long as anyone can remember, a man named Luca Turin has had an uncanny relationship with smells. He has been compared to the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, but his story is in fact stranger, because it is true. It concerns how he made use of his powerful gifts to solve one of the last great mysteries of the human body: how our noses work.
Luca Turin can distinguish the components of just about any smell, from the world’s most refined perfumes to the air in a subway car on the Paris metro. A distinguished scientist, he once worked in an unrelated field, though he made a hobby of collecting fragrances. But when, as a lark, he published a collection of his reviews of the world’s perfumes, the book hit the small, insular business of perfume makers like a thunderclap. Who is this man Luca Turin, they demanded, and how does he know so much? The closed community of scent creation opened up to Luca Turin, and he discovered a fact that astonished him: no one in this world knew how smell worked. Billions and billions of dollars were spent creating scents in a manner amounting to glorified trial and error.
The solution to the mystery of every other human sense has led to the Nobel Prize, if not vast riches. Why, Luca Turin thought, should smell be any different? So he gave his life to this great puzzle. And in the end, incredibly, it would seem that he solved it. But when enormously powerful interests are threatened and great reputations are at stake, Luca Turin learned, nothing is quite what it seems.
Acclaimed writer Chandler Burr has spent four years chronicling Luca Turin’s quest to unravel the mystery of how our sense of smell works. What has emerged is an enthralling, magical book that changes the way we think about that area between our mouth and our eyes, and its profound, secret hold on our lives.
For as long as anyone can remember, a man named Luca Turin has had an uncanny relationship with smells. He has been compared to the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, but his story is in fact stranger, because it is true. It concerns how he made use of his powerful gifts to solve one of the last great mysteries of the human body: how our noses work.
Luca Turin can distinguish the components of just about any smell, from the world’s most refined perfumes to the air in a subway car on the Paris metro. A distinguished scientist, he once worked in an unrelated field, though he made a hobby of collecting fragrances. But when, as a lark, he published a collection of his reviews of the world’s perfumes, the book hit the small, insular business of perfume makers like a thunderclap. Who is this man Luca Turin, they demanded, and how does he know so much? The closed community of scent creation opened up to Luca Turin, and he discovered a fact that astonished him: no one in this world knew how smell worked. Billions and billions of dollars were spent creating scents in a manner amounting to glorified trial and error.
The solution to the mystery of every other human sense has led to the Nobel Prize, if not vast riches. Why, Luca Turin thought, should smell be any different? So he gave his life to this great puzzle. And in the end, incredibly, it would seem that he solved it. But when enormously powerful interests are threatened and great reputations are at stake, Luca Turin learned, nothing is quite what it seems.
Acclaimed writer Chandler Burr has spent four years chronicling Luca Turin’s quest to unravel the mystery of how our sense of smell works. What has emerged is an enthralling, magical book that changes the way we think about that area between our mouth and our eyes, and its profound, secret hold on our lives.
Available formats-
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB eBook
Languages:-
Copies-
  • Available:
    1
  • Library copies:
    1
Levels-
  • ATOS:
    8.3
  • Lexile:
  • Interest Level:
    UG
  • Text Difficulty:
    7


Excerpts-
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 1

    Mystery

    Start with the deepest mystery of smell. No one knows how we do it.

    Despite everything, despite the billions the secretive giant
    corporations of smell have riding on it and the powerful computers they
    throw at it, despite the most powerful sorcery of their legions of
    chemists and the years of toiling in the labs and all the famous
    neurowizardry aimed at mastering it, the exact way we smell
    things–anything, crushed raspberry and mint, the subway at West
    Fourteenth and Eighth, a newborn infant–remains a mystery. Luca Turin
    began with that mystery.

    Or perhaps he began further back, with the perfumes. “The reason I got
    into this,” Turin will say, “is that I started collecting perfume. I’ve
    loved perfume from when I was a kid in Paris and Italy.”

    Or maybe (he’ll tell you another day, considering it from a different
    angle), maybe it was “because I’m French, at least by upbringing.
    Frenchmen will do things Anglo men won’t, and France is a country of
    smells. There’s something called pourriture noble. Noble rot. It’s a
    fungus. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juice
    wonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines like
    the sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes. The idea that things
    should be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in
    France. They like rotten cheese and dirty sheets and unwashed women. Guy
    Robert is about seventy, a third-generation perfumer, lives in the south
    of France, used to work for International Flavors & Fragrances, created
    Calèche for Hermès. One day he asked me, ‘Est-ce que vous avez senti
    some molecule or other?’ And I said no, I’d never smelled it, what’d it
    smell like? And he considered this gravely and replied, ‘ça sent la
    femme qui se néglige.’ ” (It smells of the woman who neglects herself.)

    This makes him remember something, and he leans forward
    enthusiastically. “One of the stories I heard when I started meeting the
    perfumers and was let into their tightly closed world involves Jean
    Carles, one of the greatest perfume makers in Paris–he used to work for
    Roure in Grasse, near Nice, where all perfumes used to be made. He
    became anosmic, lost his sense of smell, and he simply carried on from
    memory, creating perfumes. Like Beethoven after his deafness. Jean
    Carles went on to create the great Ma Griffe for Carven, a result of
    pure imagination in the complete absence of the relevant physical sense.
    Carles’s condition was known only to him and his son. When a client came
    in, he’d go through the motions, make a big show of smelling various
    ingredients and, finally, the perfume he had created, which he would
    present with great gravity to the client, smelling it and waving its
    odor around the room. And he couldn’t smell anything!” Turin smiles,
    thinking about it.

    The perfume obsession led Turin to write the perfume guide, which out of
    the blue cracked open for him doors into the vast, secret world in which
    perfumes are created, and there he started noticing little things that
    didn’t make sense. A weird warp in official reality. Plus there were the
    other clues, the small pockets of strangeness he bumped into in the
    scientific literature, carefully fitting these into the puzzle without
    even realizing it, without (as he’d be the first to admit) really
    understanding what he was doing. And somewhere along...

About the Author-
  • Chandler Burr is the author of A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation. He has contributed to The Atlantic and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from December 2, 2002
    Nobody knows for sure what makes our noses work the way they do, not even the $20-billion-a-year perfume industry's legions of chemists, whose jobs depend on appealing to those noses. So what happens when Luca Turin, a likable scientist who happens to possess an unusually sensitive nose, proposes a new theory of smell that promises to unravel the mystery once and for all? That's what readers find out in this often funny, picaresque exposé of the closed world of whiffs, aromas and odors—and the people who study them. Burr (A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation) narrates in depth Turin's efforts to publish in the journal Nature:
    the maddening peer review process lasts more than a year and ends with smug dismissals by scientists who don't understand his work. Turin, whose urbane personality carries the book, runs into similar brick walls when he tries to sell his ideas to the "Big Boys" of the secretive and byzantine perfume industry. Burr, who is skilled at parsing complex science and smart turns of phrase, enters the story in the first person to describe his own difficulties as a journalist writing about Turin: critics clam up and get hostile when asked about Turin's theory. Burr concludes that the hysterical, often incoherent resistance portrayed here "embodies the failure of the scientific process." Grim words for a book so full of wit. (On sale Jan. 21)Forecast:This is science writing that's definitely not just for science readers, and major review attention should pay off with sales.

  • Library Journal

    September 1, 2002
    The story of a famed scientist considered a genius of smell.

    Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    Starred review from December 1, 2002
    Science is supposed to be rational and objective, but in the real world, as mettlesome journalist Burr discovered while chronicling an ingenuous scientist's approach to solving one of the greatest mysteries of the body, how smell works, it is more often ego-driven, avaricious, and viciously resistant to fresh ideas. Burr, author of " A Separate Creation" (1996), met Luca Turin by chance, just one of the countless serendipitous moments that typify this cosmopolitan biophysicist's intuitive and innovative approach to science. Possessed of a capacious intellect, an obsession with smell, and a passion for perfume, Turin has always, Burr writes, "picked up information like flypaper." This gift, coupled with Turin's preternaturally sensitive nose, phenomenal memory, and prodigious ability to precisely describe scents, enabled him to write his renowned " Parfums: Le Guide" (1992)--which granted him precious access to the secretive big seven fragrance corporations--and to think outside the box and challenge the clearly flawed, but persistent, theory that scents are recognized by molecular shape. Turin is certain that it's molecular vibrations, and the scandalous story of his thwarted efforts to publish his exciting and provocative findings, thanks to Burr's vigorous writing style, incisive portraits, and scientific explication, is as suspenseful as it is fascinating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from December 1, 2002
    While waiting for the Eurostar, Burr, a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and author of A Separate Creation, met Dr. Luca Turin, the titular emperor. A biophysicist at University College of London, Turin believes that the nose deciphers smell by using not the shape of molecules but their vibrations. He also possesses a unique gift for scent and the ability to write about perfumes as few can. From their chance meeting, Burr set out to write "the simple story of the creation of a scientific theory" by chronicling Turin's work over several years. Having quickly discovered that his subject's story was much more complex, Burr ends up taking readers into the perfume industry and the scientific publishing world. The view is not flattering (the ugly side of peer review is depicted here in all its backstabbing glory), but thanks to Burr's sensible and honest reporting, it is an accurate portrait. Burr is also straightforward about the difficulties of working with a brilliant and eccentric man like Turin. His fascinating book is highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/02.]-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC

  • Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight "The Emperor of Scent is a gem of a book--a suspense story at whose heart is a man of super-human powers who is also flawed and justifiably arrogant and dangerously steeped in hubris. I challenge any intelligent, curious mind not to tumble into this story and find themselves immediately engrossed. I fell in love with Luca Turin--he is everything I admire in a human: irreverent, witty, imaginative, determined, elitist without a trace of snobbery and above all a creative genius. And Chandler Burr is a magician himself, and a man we should all be so lucky to have at a dinner party: I was mesmerized and enlightened by the many perfect asides woven into the main body of this incredible true tale."
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    Random House Publishing Group
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A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses
Chandler Burr
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