In this intriguing blend of provocative images and reflective prose, Patrick Süskind reveals the hidden source of his mesmerizing fiction: an obsession with the darkly erotic link between love and death. A witty and thought-provoking meditation on the two elemental forces of human existence, drawing on scenes as contemporary as a young couple having oral sex in a traffic jam, as literary as Thomas Mann’s discovery of forbidden love at an advanced age, and as mythical as the stories of death conquered through love in the narratives of Orpheus and Jesus.