In Sensorium

November 15, 2021
Novelist and perfumer Tanaïs (Bright Lines) blends in this beautiful work memoir, history, and notes on perfuming to interrogate love, violence, and generational healing. “Whereas a body cannot escape circumstance,” Tanaïs writes, “a perfume allows us to, if only for a moment.” Using the notes of a perfume—from the base to the heart to the head notes—as a framework to meditate on exile and liberation, Tanaïs contends with their roots as an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme. They begin their “base” by recounting the alienation they felt as the child of immigrants growing up in America in the 1980s and reflecting on a similar erasure of their ancestors by India’s colonization and caste system. Moving on to the “heart notes,” Tanaïs ruminates on surviving sexual violence and reclaiming joy through embracing their erotic and feminine sides. In their “head notes,” they consider their spirituality, psychedelic experiences, and how changing their birth name set them free “from patrilineage, gender, and religion in a single utterance.” Throughout, rich imagery and language are married as Tanaïs moves through their ancestral trauma to discover a place of healing, where, they write, “a perfume emerges as a sensuous act of resistance.” Readers will find more than just their olfactory senses heightened by this beautiful meditation. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

Starred review from December 15, 2021
A novelist and perfume maker serves up a lyrical memoir, sensuous and sensual, that crosses decades and continents. Tana�s, author of the acclaimed novel Bright Lines, brings a millennial sensibility--and a rejection of outmoded mores--to their work as a sharp observer of the world. Refusing old binaries, they move freely among peoples who are bitterly divided. Though descended from Bangladeshi Muslims, the author feels at home in India among Hindus, writing that neither religion "is absolved of brutal violence or enslaving innocent people." Later, they add, "I celebrate Kali puja. I recite a Buddhist Tara mantra every morning. I probably know more mantras than I do surah in the Quran." Try to explain such things to "a jaunty Indian bro" at a party, though, and the old walls come back up. Though the Brahmin in question fully grasped the racism wrought of "being brown in America," he did not carry the memory of genocide that Bangladeshis do--even today, adds Tana�s, Hindu fascists are stirring up pogroms against India's Muslims. Much of this evocative memoir is told through the vehicle of perfumes and their history. Scents mark the sex workers of South Asia and the enslaved peoples of Africa, find their way into Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, and serve to enhance appetite and desire everywhere. Readers with an interest in such things will learn, through Tana�s' elegant prose, just about everything about sandalwood essences, rhododendron incense, and "perfume as fluid as language, as lineage, as rivers of sweat." More, they'll emerge with a deeper understanding of the many ethnicities that make up South Asia and that merge in the author's sensibility along with cultural artifacts from America and elsewhere in the West, from manifestations of "radical-vision Buddhism" to the occasional dose of LSD. A heady pleasure of language in love with the author's many subjects, and perfectly suited to them.

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