The publisher notes, with regard to the book: “Ryoko Sekiguchi seeks, through writing, to retain what drifts away, the ethereal sensations: the odors, the flavors, the voices we will never hear again.” If in Nagori she spoke of taste and in The Voice Shadow she focused on hearing, now, in The Call of the Odors, she addresses the most subtle of our senses: smell.
As we know, at least since Proust and his madeleine, smell is a powerful trigger of memories, capable of reviving those buried deep within our being. Each scent has a body and a language, a presence capable of disturbing our relationship with time and space, and with this idea Sekiguchi builds a hybrid narration that, in the manner of One Thousand and One Nights, weaves together small stories set in different times and places: Granada in the present, Ferrara in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century Tehran, Paris across the centuries…
The Call of the Odors is a text of poetic breath, luminous and illuminated, in which each tale ends with a notebook of scents in which the narrator grants space to various reflections: “Sometimes we notice the presence of a person by their scent, but does absence have a scent?”; “We believe we are capable of imagining all the fragrances of happiness, but is there a fragrance of anger?”; “They say money does not smell, but the state of those who possess it does.” Perfumes and scents, absolute protagonists of the book, thus rise as embodied presences of our memories and as emissaries who reveal our future.”
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Author: Ryoko Sekiguchi. Translator: Lara Cortés Fernández. Title: The Call of the Odors. Publisher: Periférica. Available from: Todos tus libros.