Full disclaimer - I've only read halfway through the book and I don't think I am able to read a single page without throwing either the book, or myself, out of the window.
From the very beginning, I was rubbed the wrong way by the Québecoise author describing her accent as "rural" and talking about how she put a fake French accent in school to be "sophisticated". This is comparable from someone from Alabama inexplicably speaking with a posh London accent in her school. She spares no opportunity to bash her French Canadian origins and idolizing Paris as if she had escaped the armpit of the world. More on her fake French persona later...
The author paraphrased some passages from sources actually detailing the history of perfumes, and that is the only interesting part. Period.. The rest are personal anecdotes (where you can feel her pedantic and self-important personality) that she wrote with a synonym dictionary by her side to change every normal word into its most pretentious version. You can't help feeling like punching her in the face with anecdotes such as being checked out by a mechanic fixing her father's car and reminiscing: "He couldn't possibly read all the signs I'd accumulated on my body... the signs that said "intellectual, "sophisticated",... First I cringed, then I craved in... the disconcerting pleasure of being just-a-woman rather than a Parisian intellectual... capable of decoding Jaques Derrida before lunch and still have appetite left over for a nibble of Jaques Lacan...", or the more humble: "It was all Immanuel Kant's fault... I'd read his "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment in one sitting... and been struck down with such a violent fever I became delirious - my writer-lover said that was what happened when women like me were exposed to German philosophy." My level of cringe is through the roof only from having to type these passages into a review. I am halfway through the book and maybe there's been a page's worth of her actual experience of annoying the perfumer to death with her demanding nature after he nicely offered to craft a perfume based on some erotic memory of her hook-up in Seville with some rando in a park.
I made the mistake of looking her up on YouTube and hearing her fake Parisian accent (it's not even a Quebecoise adding a couple French words and intonation, she mysteriously developed a full new "Parisian" persona). I will not be able to finish the book because now I all can hear when I read is a voice-over of the text with her phony accent.
I give this 0,5 on 10. I guess if you have a high tolerance for bullsh*t you may be able to ignore the 97% of her self-important ramblings and learn maybe just a little bit about perfume.. but there are a bunch of other books that go straight to the point, like "Parfums de Legende" by Anne Davis and Bertrand Meyer-Stabley. Spare yourself a literary punch in the liver and skip this one.
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