Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life

This scattershot chronicle by Levitt (A Short Bright Flash), a history professor at the University of Mississippi, gets lost in the weeds exploring the 19th-century French perfume industry. She purports to examine the careers of perfumers and chemists Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent and their quest to discover the chemical difference between organic and inorganic matter, delving into their attempts to distill from almonds a compound thought to be constant across living organisms, and outlining the theoretical disputes between Laurent and his mentor about the principles underlying chemical reactions. However, Laugier and Laurent’s story often takes a backseat to digressive and laboriously detailed accounts of the insular controversies and feuds of French perfumers, including a spat between a British chemist and a French pharmacist over a lucrative patent on one of the first artificial perfumes and the efforts of a descendant of the original purveyor of cologne to expand the family business. The meticulous discussions of the chemistry of perfume and how it is created will satisfy the most curious readers, but those with a more cursory interest will find their patience tested by exhaustive descriptions of the industry’s internecine squabbles. This struggles to stay on task. (Apr.)