M. T. Anderson: Strange Mr. Satie (2003)

Walking through the streets of Paris over a hundred years ago, Erik Satie could not have looked more normal in his black bowler hat and tie. But Mr. Satie was dreaming of music no one had heard before – music like ancient chants and modern circus tunes rolled into one. A friend of poets, puppeteers, magicians, great painters like Picasso, and the Surrealists, Satie was at the center of a world where sense was nonsense, and the imagination ruled supreme.

M. T. Anderson recounts the story of the irreverent French composer in a biography that is witty, accessible, and endlessly surprising, while Petra Mathers’s illustrations capture all the vibrancy that was Erik Satie’s topsy-turvy world.

Illustrated by Petra Mathers
Publisher Viking, New York, 2003
38 pages

Review (Alice Cary, BookPage, 2003)

Author

PDF (13 MB)