The Story of Mr Sommer

The Story of Mr. Sommer is a novella by the German writer Patrick Süskind, published in 1991 by Diogenes, with pictures by Jean -Jacques Sempé.

Content

The narrator describes in retrospect the childhood of a boy in a small southern German city. His rather unhappy life is drawn through piano lessons at an unfairly strict teacher, his long way to school (his home town is divided by a lake and the school is located on the other side), the superficiality of his parents and a desperate, this unrequited love for a classmate.

Here, everyone knows in the city the strange Mr. Sommer, which thus notice that he constantly wanders aimlessly and doggedly. No one knows where or why. The boy observes Mr. Sommer and feels a connection between the wanderings of the Lord summer and his own emotional wanderings.

The book ends with the suicide by drowning Mr. Sommers, who is being watched by the boy by accident. The day after that, although Mr. missing summer, but it makes no worries. After two weeks, but a missing person is abandoned. But you will not find Mr. Sommer. The boy does not say anything about the incident at the lake, and so the people have in the city forget all again soon.

Interpretation

The amendment can be considered as an example of unreliable narration. The narrator begins the story with the mathematically exact calculation of its rate of fall and finished his story in order to describe a physically impossible suicide. Repeatedly emphasizing the narrator 's unreliability, as he has since the fall of a tree problems to concentrate. He also suffers from a right-left weakness. Problems in the calculation of simple mathematical tasks, right-left weakness and avowed concentration difficulties could be that the narrator has ( angular gyrus ) suffered a brain injury in a fall from the tree and since then suffers the Gerstmann syndrome. By this way of interpreting the entire fictional reality, including the existence of Mr. Sommer, in doubt. See also the article by Bareis ( S.U. ).

Book editions

• The story of Mr Sommer. Diogenes, Zurich, 1991; Reprint ibid. 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-05728-7 ( hardcover ).
• The story of Mr Sommer. Diogenes, Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-257-22664-0 ( paperback ).
• The story of Mr Sommer. 2 audio CDs, read by Hans Korte. Diogenes, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-257-80017-7 (Book ).