Aroma

8 hrs. 6 min.

Language Russian

Author Paul Richardo

Narrator Vladimir Lesnykh

Description

When asked about his work, Elias Revo usually answers evasively: “In an aromatherapy office.” In reality, he is an olfaction assistant at “Fragrance,” an influential corporation that trades in an unusual service: using scents, it allows clients to relive the past. Elias is gifted with a rare sense of smell from birth, and he can turn vague fragments of memories into precise chemical formulas. For him “Fragrance” isn’t just a place of employment, but a quiet harbor: the aromas protect him from the world, which seems too loud and painfully harsh.

However, his internship at the headquarters changes everything. There he meets Nora Olsson—a cold, uncompromising woman determined to keep her secrets with her at any cost, both professional and personal. Because of this meeting, the hyper-sensitive Elias—who only dreamed of “pouring nostalgia into bottles”—finds himself pulled into a dark criminal investigation and realizes: evil also has a scent.

Paul Rishardot writes about a world he knows from the inside—he himself is a perfumer. Raised on Süskind’s “Perfume” and strict scientific science fiction, he builds the perfumery in his sensory thriller “The Scent” on a scientific foundation (with one fantastical premise), and twists the intrigue so tightly it won’t let go until the last page. Even the image of a fictional ominous corporation is based on a real professional anecdote that circulated among French specialists: that someone planned to illegally scent alcohol and then bring it into the USSR via smuggling.

“The Scent” is Rishardot’s debut novel, already translated into dozens of languages. The author tells of the complex and mesmerizing craft of creating smells, the rare gift of finely tuned senses, an investigation that is almost impossible to finish, and a kind of justice that’s far more tangled than one would like—but still exists.