Bahrain-based blogger Bint Battuta writes her thoughts on the book Perfume – from a linguistic perspective. “Perfume is a novel written in German, but set in France. I read the English translation; I can't judge the translation fully, as I haven't looked at the German (I would be interested to one day, though), but on the whole it reads smoothly. What it prompted me to think about was the way language conveys culture; as a native English-speaker, English to a large extent is a neutral language for me,” she explains.