''Perfume''; or by the subtitle, ''The Story of a Murderer''; or by the painting of the nude woman on the dust jacket, a detail from Watteau's ''Nymphe et Satyre''; or by the jovial yet ironic voice of the narrator? ''In eighteenth-century France,'' he begins, ''there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.'' He continues, ''His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name . . . has been forgotten today, it is . . . because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.''
Combined, these various elements offset each other in such a teasingly incongruous way that one of the first attractions of Patrick Suskind's remarkable fable is simply to watch the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
The abominable personage is a bastard child born in a Paris fishmonger's stall on July 17, 1738. Nobody wants the infant because something is wrong with him: his body has no smell. And yet no scent is not discerned by him. At the age of 6, ''he had completely grasped his surroundings olfactorily.'' ''Perhaps the closest analogy to his talent is the musical wunderkind, who has heard his way inside melodies and harmonies to the alphabet of individual tones and now composes completely new melodies and harmonies all on his own. With the one difference, however, that the alphabet of odors is incomparably larger and more nuanced than that of tones; and with the additional difference that the creative activity of Grenouille the wunderkind took place only inside him and could be perceived by no one other than himself.''
And the nude on the dust jacket represents what Jean-Baptiste will eventually seek in his quest for the ideal scent - the ''essence absolue'' of life itself, a perfume made from beautiful women. And of course, as we soon come to realize, for these women to yield their fragrance, they will have to be murdered.
徐四金 Patrick Suskind (1949~)，Sempe (插畫者1932~2022)。 重讀Mr. Summer's Story. Wozniak ：在6歲到10歲之間，你會失去兩樣東西， 一是你的童年自傳記憶，另一是你的牙齒。」
讀Google Books說明
缺插畫者說明J. J. Sempé 1932~2022
身為國際暢銷作家的徐四金早在求學時就開始嘗試散文與電影劇本的創作，1981年時他以單人廣播劇、舞台劇劇本《低音大提琴》開始受到注目，但真正讓他享譽國際的卻是1985年出版的小說《香水》，是本擁有48種以上語文譯本的暢銷作品。
徐四金現居於慕尼黑與巴黎，並從事電影劇本的創作工作。雖然他是位知名度很高的作家，但卻以行事低調甚少願意接受訪問而出名。
作品[編輯]
著作リスト[編集]
- コントラバス Der Kontrabass、1981 池田信雄,山本直幸訳 同学社, 1988
- 香水 ある人殺しの物語 Das Parfum、1985 池内紀訳 文芸春秋 1988 のち文庫
- 鳩 Die Taube、1987 岩淵達治訳 同学社 1989
- ゾマーさんのこと Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer、1991 池内紀訳 文芸春秋 1992
- Three Stories and a Reflection, 1996
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Patrick Suskind
About the Author
作者 Patrick Suskind (Author), Sempe (Illustrator)
Mr. Summer's Story By Patrick Süskind
In an altogether unexpected change of pace from the evil flamboyance of his phenomenal Perfume and the Kafkaesque paranoia of The Pigeon, the brilliant German writer Patrick Suskind joins forces with Sempe, the illustrator of New Yorker magazine fame, to bring us a haunting and deceptively simple tale of childhood, innocence lost, and memory as seen in flashback through the eyes of a man now middle-aged. Mr. Summer's Story is, in fact, the story of the child whose path he crosses only fleetingly but whose life - otherwise ordinary in every way - is forever changed by those few moments in time. At the story's conclusion, the enigmatic Mr. Summer, whose first name no one seems to know, who wanders silently through the countryside, and who is heard to utter but one sentence in the entire novel, appears to us as a man both noble and tragic, whose ultimate disappearance remains a mystery - and a secret - to all but the little boy he unknowingly touched long ago. A timeless and universal fable for children and adults alike.
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