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__smell:THE SECRET SEDUCER
_____BY PIET VROON * FARRAR, STRAUS, & GIROUX *
BY PETER KURTH | every now and then a book comes along that won't take no for an answer. It just demands to be adored, either because its subject matter is so unusual, or because the earnestness of its approach and the gallantry of its mission leave you with no alternative but to surrender. Such a book is "Smell: The Secret Seducer," described in its publicity as "everything you ever wanted to know about one of the most underrated and overlooked of the five senses." Here at last is the complete social, cultural and scientific history of aromas and miasmas, noses and perfumes, "smell disorders" and "olfactory dysfunction," written in a spirit of aggressive dedication by a Dutch professor of psychology, Piet Vroon, with the assistance of Anton van Amerongen and Hans de Vries. It is the declared intention of this learned triumvirate not just to inform but to enlighten the world, and to restore smell, the most neglected and maligned of the senses, to pride of place among her sisters. "It is both reprehensible and strange that so little attention is paid to the way in which smells (apart from perfumes) can affect our behavior, our social interaction, and our well-being," Vroon contends. "After all, everybody knows that factors such as excessive noise, poor ventilation and the color or temperature of artificial lighting affect our well-being, so why is there almost no research into how we are affected by smells?" The answer lies in Western society's love-hate relationship with its own animality, in our highly developed sense of shame about our bodies and the odors they produce, in our generalized fears of sex and death, and in our ongoing fantasy that we can control the universe. Among the five senses, smell is the most easily manipulated and the most closely linked to emotion and memory. It is also the one sense most people assume they can do without, as evidenced by the ongoing effort of consumer capitalism to eliminate it entirely from the body, home and environment. Strange indeed to Vroon is the spectacle of 5 billion of God's creatures spritzing their armpits, abrading their teeth and obsessively wiping and spraying their genitals in a desperate attempt to become like the angels (and simultaneously to keep the marketplace humming and the money churning out by not distracting the workers with the odors of their neighbors).
I won't pretend that I read "Smell" at one sitting, from cover to cover or from start to finish. Vroon & Co. recommend that you take it as it pleases you, in bits and pieces, skipping the parts that don't concern you in order to savor more fully the ones that do. Did you know that 20 percent of the Dutch population encounters "problems with smell" upon leaving the house? That women generally smell "more intensely" than men, but that they lose this advantage when menstruating? That "the Romans washed white togas in old, stinking urine," and that Emperor Vespasian wanted to raise taxes on the use of public outhouses, saying, "Pecunia non olet -- Money does not smell"? There isn't a page of this book that doesn't captivate and fascinate, and I hope its authors are inhaling proudly all the way to the bank.
Peter Kurth is a writer and biographer in Burlington, Vt. |
