Mr. Summer's Story

Today I recommend a short novel, translated from the German, hauntingly beautiful. Your library could get it for you.

Here are 3 reviews that describe it better than I can. The illustrations by Sempe are wonderful.

From Publishers Weekly:

German novelist and playwright Suskind, whose sophisticated novel Perfume drew international attention, now offers a deceptively simple, rather slight fable of childhood and lost innocence. Mr. Summer, a tall, gaunt eccentric whose first name none of the townsfolk knows, roves through the unnamed European countryside every day from dawn until late evening. The goal of his endless nature walks remains a mystery. The nameless narrator, a middle-aged man recollecting his boyhood, tells how he resolved to commit suicide after receiving a verbal thrashing from his hunchbacked piano teacher, only to be inadvertently thwarted by Mr. Summer. When their paths cross again on a black October night six years later, the youth, now in high school, witnesses the mysterious man's final plunge into darkness. Is Mr. Summer a redemptive figure? Is he emblematic of our ruptured unity with nature? Suskind leaves the answers open-ended in a beautifully translated tale. Illustrations not seen by PW. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Suskind, whose novel Perfume ( LJ 10/15/86) was an international best seller, has a lightness of touch rarely associated with German literature. The narrator of this slender volume, a middle-aged man looking back on his childhood, reveals on the very first page a delightful personality: innocent, whimsical, eager, and filled with wonder. Mr. Summer, the ostensible main character, is an enigmatic, ultimately tragic figure whose capacity to walk endlessly through the countryside gives the narrative a fairy tale-like quality. A plot summary would give away too much without ever elucidating this magical work's essence. Highly recommended for general readers.- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From Sskind, author of Perfume (1986) and The Pigeon (1988), comes this tiny little pleasure, hardly more than a longish and quietly garrulous short story, about a handful of years in a post- WW II German boyhood. Symbols fall like quiet raindrops here as a nameless narrator recalls his boyhood life in the village of Lower Lake--learning to ride a bicycle, falling out of a tree, being disappointed in first love, suffering absurdly and terribly (to the point of considering suicide) through the hilarious agony of piano lessons. As daily life unfolds itself to this boy, he quietly observes the odd Mr. Summer, the mysterious and solitary village eccentric who endlessly and incessantly walks alone, tramping for mile after mile along road and trail and pathway and in every kind of weather throughout the surrounding countryside. At story's end, the lives of Mr. Summer and of the nameless boy will come together in a way that's unexpected, terrible, pathetic, and exquisite. Sometimes verging on the saccharine or the slight, but never calamitously, Sskind's story offers the pleasures of a modest, private, unassuming glimpse into cosmic grief--the way a first-rate Garrison Keillor monologue can do, say, or a Dylan Thomas memory of long-ago childhood in Wales. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.