This slim novella tells the story of Jonathan Noel. Somewhere along the path of growing up, Jonathan has lost any adventurousness he might ever have possessed. He moves to Paris, and when he finds a job as a bank guard, which requires him to stand on the marble steps of the entrance during opening hours, he decides that this is as good as life is going to get for him.

Jonathan has been in this job for twenty years before he suffers the existential crisis described here. He has, by his own calculations, spent fifty-five thousand hours standing on the very same spot, and he has never been able to find fault with his employment situation. He even wishes to consolidate his life so far by actually buying the tiny room in the hostel where he has been staying since his arrival in Paris, conveniently located only five minutes’ walk from work.

It is the confrontation with a common pigeon standing in the corridor outside his room that throws him completely off balance. The thought of this pigeon watching him, fouling the corridor and putting his home under siege oppresses him so that he takes fright and resolves to escape to a hotel for the time being.

When, to his surprise, he survives the following night, dramatically heightened by a thunderstorm, he finds that he is able to confront the challenges of life just ever so slightly better than he had thought.

The Pigeon lacks the grand scale of Süskind’s earlier and more famous novel Perfume, and little happens in the way of action, at least from a normal point of view. However in this very introspective novella, little things assume immensurable proportions and prove themselves too big for Jonathan’s frightened, little soul. Unlike Perfume, which recounts the story of a murderer bizarrely obsessed with smells and blessed as well as cursed with a superhumanly developed olfactory sense, The Pigeon is concerned not so much with the outwardly extreme but with exploring the terrors that lie hidden behind an all-too-normal existence as well as the human tragedy of an unloved life.

‘Now he saw the pigeon. It was sitting to his right at a distance of about five feet, at the very end of the hall, crouched in one corner. So little light fell on the spot, and Jonathan cast such a brief glance in that direction, that he could not discern whether its eye was open or closed. He did not want to know either. He would have preferred not to have seen it at all. In his book in tropical fauna he had once read that certain animals, above all orangutans, pounced on you only if you looked them in the eye; if you ignored them, then they left you alone. Perhaps this was true of pigeons as well.’ p19