SOURCE: Brady, Philip. “Child-Minded.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4672 (16 October 1992): 24.

In the following review, Brady assesses the plot, style, and themes of The Story of Mr. Sommer.

Patrick Süskind, rarely out of Germany's bestseller lists in recent years, cannot be accused of always trawling the same rich waters. His tragi-comic, minutely observed monodrama The Double Bass (1984) prepared no one for his record-breaking novel Perfume (1985), exotic, gruesome, part history, part crime-fiction and far from comic. The Story of Mr. Sommer springs another surprise. It is a novella told—or, more precisely, ramblingly recollected—by a narrator who is inside his own childhood thought-patterns and yet well beyond them.

The ramblings are crucial—Süskind's narrator admits to “a certain mental fogginess, an inability to concentrate”—and one of the delights of the story is its unpredictability, passing from the thrill of tree-climbing to Galileo on the acceleration of falling...