Customer Reviews

Story of Mr Sommer the - Pbk

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This book is written in a childish style, using normal words and some great artist pictures to describe some deep meanings, which are impressed me very much. I always send this book to a friend as a gift, because I believe it is absolutely interesting to them. After reading this book, the feeling is just like that: I finished a taoist dream.

Mr. Sommer was a strange person, who, whenever be seen, was always walking, day and night. Why was he endlessly walking? Nobody seemed to know and later nobody seemed to care. It's a story about Mr. Sommer, narrated by a person, who recalled few encounters he had with Mr. Sommer in his childhood. Those "encounters" are told in combined with some important events happened in his young days, like the first love, the first bicycle, and the piano lessons. From these, you also learn about the narrator himself. These pieces of memoirs were so funny (or bitter sweet) that made me laugh out loud. That they were until the last encounter with Mr. Sommer, which led me ponder how it would affect a teen like this narrator.

It's a tiny book with illustrations by Sempé (whose works appeared in New Yorker several times). The US edition (Mr. Summer's Story) has been out of print for a long time. Fortunately, Bloomsbury in UK reprinted it in Nov. 2003. The book doesn't give you some "moral" behind the story explicitly -- you can have your own by yourself. In any case, it's really worth reading.