Homo Faber

By Max Frisch

A man who strives for pure rationality and control finds himself at the mercy of fate, in a “novel that speaks tellingly of loneliness, love, and despair” (Booklist).
 
Walter Faber, engineer, is a man for whom only the tangible, calculable, verifiable exists. He is devoted to the service of a purely technological world. His associates have nicknamed him Homo Faber—“Man the Maker.”
 
But during a flight to South America, Faber succumbs to what he calls “fatigue phenomena,” losing touch with reality—and soon he finds himself crisscrossing the globe, from New York to France to Italy to Greece. He also finds himself in the company of a woman who—for reasons he cannot explain or understand—strongly attracts him.
 
The basis for the film Voyager starring Sam Shepard, this novel “capture[s] that essential anguish of modern man which we find in the best of Camus” (Saturday Review).
 
Translated by Michael Bullock

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 1994
• ISBN: 9780547540375

Max Frisch

Max Frisch, born in Zurich in 1911, was one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, achieving fame as a novelist, playwright, diarist, and essayist. He died in 1991, the year Homo Faber was made by Volker Schlondorff into the acclaimed motion picture Voyager, starring Sam Shepard.

Book preview

First Stop

WE were leaving from La Guardia airport, New York, three hours late because of snowstorms. Our plane, as usual on this route, was a Super-Constellation. Since it was night, I immediately prepared to go to sleep. We spent another forty minutes waiting on the runway with snow in front of the searchlights, powdery snow whirling over the runway, and what made me tense and anxious, so that I couldn’t get off to sleep straight away, was not the newspaper brought around by our air hostess, FIRST PICTURES OF WORLD’S GREATEST AIR CRASH IN NEVADA, a piece of news I had already seen at midday, but simply and solely the vibration in this stationary plane with its engines running—and also the young German next to me, who immediately caught my attention, I don’t know why, he caught my attention the moment he took off his overcoat, when he sat down and pulled at his trouser creases, when he did nothing at all, but simply waited for the takeoff like the rest of us, merely sat in his seat, a fair-haired fellow with pink skin who at once introduced himself, before we had even fastened our safety belts. I didn’t catch his name, the engines were roaring, being revved up one after the other . . .

I was dead tired.

Ivy had talked away at me for three hours while we waited for the overdue plane, although she knew I was dead set against marrying.

I was glad to be alone.

At last we started.

I had never taken off in such a snowstorm before: no sooner was our landing gear off the white runway than there was nothing more to be seen of the yellow ground lights, not a glimmer, and a little later there was not a glimmer of Manhattan, it was snowing so hard. I could see only the flashing green light on our wing, which was swaying violently and occasionally jerked up and down; for seconds at a time even this flashing green light vanished in the mist and I felt like a blind man.

Permission to smoke.

He came from Düsseldorf, my neighbor, and he wasn’t as young as all that, in his early thirties, younger than I at any rate; he was going to Guatemala; on business as he immediately told me . . .

The wind was buffeting the plane pretty hard.

He offered me cigarettes, my neighbor, but I took one of my own, although I had no wish to smoke, and thanked him; then I picked up the paper again; there was no desire on my part to get better acquainted. Perhaps it was rude of me. I had a hard week behind me, not a day without a conference, I wanted to rest. People are tiring. Later on, I took my papers out of my briefcase in order to work; unfortunately hot soup came along just then, and after this there was no stopping the German. (He spotted me as Swiss the moment I replied in German to his halting English.) He discussed the weather or more exactly radar, which he knew very little about. Then, as is customary since the Second World War, he began to talk about European brotherhood. I didn’t say much. When we had drunk our soup I looked out of the window, although there was nothing to be seen but the flashing green light on our wet wing, the usual shower of sparks and the red glow in the engine cowl. We were still rising.

Later I slept.

The gusts of wind fell off.

I don’t know why he got on my nerves, there was something familiar about his face, a very German face. I thought about it with my eyes closed, but in vain. I tried to forget his pink face, which I succeeded in doing, and slept for about six hours, worn out as I was. But no sooner was I awake than he began to get on my nerves again.

He was already eating his breakfast.

I pretended to be still asleep.

As I could see out of my right eye, we were somewhere over the Mississippi, flying at a great height and absolutely smoothly, our propellers flashing in the morning sun; the usual windowpanes, you see them and at the same time look through them; the wings also glistening, rigid in empty space, no swaying now, we were poised motionless in a cloudless sky, a flight like hundreds of others; the engines running smoothly.

Good morning, he said.

I returned his greeting.

Did you sleep well? he inquired.

We could make out the tributaries of the Mississippi, though only through mist, like trickles of molten brass or bronze. It was still early in the morning, I knew this part of the run, I shut my eyes with the intention of going to sleep again.

He was reading a paperback.

It was no use shutting my eyes, I was awake and there was nothing I could do about it; I kept thinking about my neighbor. I could see him, so to speak, with my eyes shut. I ordered breakfast . . . This was his first visit to the States, as I had supposed, but his opinion of the country was already cut and dried; on the whole, he found the Americans lacking in culture, but there were certain things of which he could not help approving, for instance the friendly attitude of most Americans toward Germany.

I didn’t contradict.

No German wanted rearmament, but the Russians were forcing it on America, it was tragic, as a Swiss (a Switzer, he called it) I couldn’t judge these things because I’d never been in the Caucasus, he had been in the Caucasus, he knew Ivan and you could only teach him with weapons. He knew Ivan! He repeated this several times. You could only teach him with weapons, he said. Nothing else made any impression on Ivan . . .

I peeled my apple.

To distinguish between the master races and inferior races, as Hitler did, was nonsense of course; but Asiatics were always Asiatics . . .

I ate my apple.

I took my electric shaver out of my briefcase in order to shave or rather to be alone for a quarter of an hour; I don’t like Germans, although my friend Joachim was also a German . . . In the washroom I wondered whether I should move to another seat. I just didn’t feel like getting better acquainted with this gentleman, and it would be at least another four hours before we reached Mexico City, where my neighbor had to change planes. I had made up my mind to sit somewhere else; there were a number of places free. When I came back into the cabin, shaved, so that I felt freer, more confident—I can’t bear being unshaven—he had just taken the liberty of picking up my papers from the floor in case somebody trod on them. He handed them to me, politeness personified. I thanked him as I stowed the papers away in my briefcase, rather too cordially, it seems, since he immediately took advantage of my thanks to ask more questions.

Did I work for UNESCO?

I felt my stomach—as I often did recently. There was no real pain, I was simply aware of having a stomach, a stupid feeling. Perhaps that was why I was so disagreeable. I sat down in my old seat and, in order not to be disagreeable, told him I was concerned in TECHNICAL AID TO UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES; I can talk about this while thinking of something entirely different. I don’t know what I was thinking about. He seemed to be impressed by UNESCO, as he was by anything international, he stopped treating me as a Switzer and listened as though I were an authority, with positive reverence, interested to the point of subservience, which didn’t prevent him from getting on my nerves.

I was glad when we landed.

Just as we left the plane and parted in front of the customs shed I realized what it was that had struck me earlier: his face, though plump and pink as Joachim’s never was, none the less reminded me of Joachim . . .

Then I forgot it.

That was in Houston, Texas.

After the customs, after the usual palaver about my camera, which has been halfway round the world with me, I went into the bar for a drink, but noticed that my Düsseldorfer was already sitting in the bar and actually keeping a stool free—presumably for me!—and went straight down into the washroom, where, having nothing else to do, I washed my hands.

We were stopping twenty minutes.

As I first washed and then dried my hands, I saw my face in the mirror, as white as wax with patches of gray and yellow and purple veins, a horrible sight, like the face of a corpse. I assumed it was due to the neon light and dried my hands, which were also yellowish-purple; then came the usual announcement over the loudspeaker, which was transmitted to every part of the building, consequently also to the basement. ATTENTION PLEASE, ATTENTION PLEASE. I didn’t know what was happening. My hands were sweating; although it was positively cold in this washroom, it was hot outside. All I knew was that when I came to, a fat black woman was bending over me, a cleaner whom I hadn’t noticed before; she was only a few inches away, I could see her enormous mouth with the black lips and her pink gums; I heard the echoing loudspeaker while I was still on my hands and knees.

THE PLANE IS READY FOR DEPARTURE.

And again:

THE PLANE IS READY FOR DEPARTURE.

I was used to this public-address system.

all passengers for mexico-guatemala-panama, in between engines roaring, KINDLY REQUESTED, engines roaring, GATE NUMBER FIVE, THANK YOU.

I stood up.

The black woman was still kneeling.

I swore never to smoke again and tried to hold my face under the faucet, but couldn’t because of the basin. It was a sweating attack, that was all, a sweating attack accompanied by dizziness.

ATTENTION PLEASE.

I felt better at once.

PASSENGER FABER, PASSENGER FABER.

That was I.

PLEASE CHECK IN AT THE INFORMATION DESK.

I heard the message, I dipped my face in the basin, I hoped they would fly on without me, the water was very little colder than my sweat, I couldn’t understand why the black woman suddenly burst out laughing—it made her breasts shake like a jelly; that was how she had to laugh with her enormous mouth, her frizzy hair, her white and black eyes, a close-up from Africa. Then it came again: THE PLANE IS READY FOR DEPARTURE. I dried my face with a handkerchief, while the black woman brushed my trousers. I even combed my hair merely to waste time, announcement after announcement came over the loudspeaker, arrivals, departures, then once again:

PASSENGER FABER, PASSENGER FABER . . .

She refused to accept money, it was a pleasure for her that I was still alive, that the Lord had heard her prayer. I just put the dollar bill down beside her, but she followed me out on to the stairs where, as a Negro, she wasn’t allowed to go, and forced the bill into my hand.

The bar was empty.

I slipped onto a stool, lit a cigarette, watched the barman drop the usual olive into the cold glass and then pour the liquid on to it with the usual movement, holding the strainer in front of the silver cocktail shaker with his thumb, so that no ice should drop into the glass, and I put my dollar bill down; outside, a Super-Constellation rolled past and out onto the runway for the take-off. Without me! I was drinking my dry martini when the loudspeaker began to rumble again. ATTENTION PLEASE. For a while there was nothing to be heard, the engines of the departing Super-Constellation were roaring just outside before it rose into the air and flew off over our heads. Then again:

PASSENGER FABER, PASSENGER FABER . . .

Nobody could know this referred to me, and I told myself they couldn’t wait much longer. I went up onto the observation roof to see our plane. It was standing there looking as though it was ready to take off: the Shell tankers had gone, but the propellers weren’t turning. I drew a deep breath as I saw our passengers streaming across the empty airfield to go aboard, my Düsseldorfer near the front. I waited for the propellers to start turning; the loudspeaker echoed and crackled here too.

PLEASE GO TO THE INFORMATION DESK.

But it wasn’t for me.

MISS SHERBON, MR. AND MRS. ROSENTHAL . . .

I waited and waited, the four crosses of the propellers remained absolutely still. I couldn’t stand this feeling of being waited for, and went down into the basement again, where I hid behind the bolted door of a toilet. Then it came again:

PASSENGER FABER, PASSENGER FABER.

It was a woman’s voice. And I was sweating again and had to sit down to save myself from feeling giddy. My feet were visible.

THIS IS OUR LAST CALL.

Again: THIS IS OUR LAST CALL.

I don’t really know why I was hiding. I was ashamed of myself; I’m not generally the last. I stayed in my hiding place at least ten minutes after the loudspeaker had given me up. I simply didn’t feel like flying any farther. I waited behind the bolted door until I heard the thunder of an engine taking off, a Super-Constellation, I know the sound! Then I rubbed my face, so that my pallor shouldn’t attract attention, and left the toilet like any ordinary person. I whistled to myself, I stood in the hall and bought some newspaper or other, I had no idea what to do in this Houston, Texas. It was strange: suddenly everything was happening without me. I listened every time the loudspeaker boomed—then, for the sake of something to do, I walked over to the Western Union counter to send a wire about my luggage, which was flying on to Mexico without me, then a wire to Caracas saying that the assembly of the turbines should be postponed twenty-four hours, then a wire to New York. I was just putting my ballpoint pen back in my pocket when our air hostess, the usual list in her other hand, took me by the elbow.

There you are!

I was speechless.

We’re late, Mr. Faber, we’re late.

I followed her holding my superfluous wires, with all sorts of excuses that were of no interest, out to our Super-Constellation; I walked like a man being led out of jail into the courtroom—my eyes on the floor or on the gangway, which was detached and wheeled away the moment I was inside the cabin.

I’m sorry, I said, I’m sorry.

The passengers, their safety belts already fastened, turned to look at me without a word, and my Düsseldorfer, whom I had forgotten, immediately gave me back my window seat. He was very concerned as to what had happened. I told him my watch had stopped and took it off my wrist.

Take-off normal.

The next thing my neighbor told me was interesting—I found him altogether more congenial now that my stomach was no longer troubling me. He admitted that the German cigar was not yet among the world’s best, the first essential for a good cigar, he said, was good tobacco.

He unfolded a map.

The plantation his firm hoped to develop lay, it seemed, at the end of the world, territory of Guatemala, to be reached from Flores only on horseback, whereas from Palenque (territory of Mexico) you could get to it by jeep without trouble; even a Nash, he asserted, had been driven through this jungle.

He himself was flying there for the first time.

Population: Indians.

It interested me, inasmuch as I, too, was concerned with with the exploitation of underdeveloped areas; we agreed that roads would have to be built, perhaps even a small airfield, it was all a question of connections, the goods would be shipped at Puerto Barrios. A bold enterprise, it seemed to me, not unreasonable, however, perhaps really the future of the German cigar.

He folded up the map.

I wished him good luck.

You couldn’t see anything on his map (1 : 500,000) anyway, a no man’s land, white with two blue lines, rivers, between green state frontiers, the only names (in red and unreadable without a magnifying glass) referred to Mayan ruins.

I wished him good luck.

A brother of his, who had been living there for months, was obviously having trouble with the climate—I could just imagine it, flat, tropical country, the humidity during the rainy season, the vertical sun.

That was the end of the conversation.

I smoked, gazing out of the window: below, the Gulf of Mexico, a multitude of little clouds casting violet shadows on the greenish sea, the usual play of colors, I had filmed it often enough. I shut my eyes to catch up on some of the sleep Ivy had robbed me of. The airplane was now absolutely quiet; so was my neighbor.

He was reading his novel.

Novels don’t interest me. Nor do dreams. I dreamed about Ivy, I think, anyhow I felt oppressed, it was in a Las Vegas poolroom (I’ve never been to Las Vegas in reality), there was a tremendous din and above it loudspeakers kept calling out my name, a chaos of blue and red and yellow automatic machines at which you could win money, a lottery, I was waiting among a lot of stark naked people to be divorced (though in reality I’m not married), somehow Professor O., my esteemed teacher at the Swiss College of Technology, was in it, he was wildly sentimental and kept weeping all the time, although he is a mathematician, or rather a professor of electrodynamics, it was very embarrassing, but the craziest thing of all, I was married to the Düsseldorfer! . . . I wanted to protest, but couldn’t open my mouth without holding my hand over it, for all my teeth had just fallen out, I could feel them in my mouth like so many pebbles . . .

The moment I woke up I knew what was happening.

Beneath us the open sea . . .

It was the left-hand engine that had broken down; one propeller stood out like a rigid cross against the cloudless sky—that was all.

Beneath us, as I have said, the Gulf of Mexico.

Our air hostess, a girl of twenty, little more than a child to look at, had taken hold of my left shoulder to wake me, but I realized what was going on before she told me, handing me a green life-jacket as she spoke; my neighbor was in the act of fastening his life-jacket, jokingly as in all such emergency drills.

We were flying at an altitude of at least six thousand feet.

Of course none of my teeth had fallen out, not even my crowned tooth, right upper fourth; I felt relieved, positively cheerful.

From the corridor in front the pilot announced:

THERE IS NO DANGER WHATEVER.

The life-jackets were just a precaution, our plane could have gone on flying even with two engines, we were eight and a half miles from the Mexican coast, heading for Tampico, all passengers were kindly requested to keep calm

Reviews for Homo Faber

[maxernst11 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Echt een tegenvaller, na de lectuur van Stiller. De thematiek is boeiend genoeg: hyperrationalistisch technicus botst op het ?chte leven, wordt erdoor door elkaar geschud en gaat helemaal anders kijken anar de wereld. Maar de manier waarop dit wordt aangebracht is zo onwaarschijnlijk: 50-jarige wordt verliefd op 23-jarige, die later zijn dochter blijkt te zijn, en dan kort daarop sterft na een adderbeet; bovendien is de stijl zeer rudimentair, in korte, nukkige, onbewogen zinnen (bewust wellicht, als weergave van de nuchtere hoofdpersoon), dat het soms afstotend werkt. Kortom, een teleurstelling.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A novel of slowing down and being left behind by the world and technology, and the imprisonment that that world might bring.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I can see the point of it, and enjoyed the language and style, but I wasn't really convinced by the whole "engineering vs. Greek tragedy" thing. The symbolism seemed a bit too heavy-handed, somehow, and Faber's character a bit too one-sided. Maybe it's simply a mistake to read serious books when you have a cold. Or maybe I've just read too much Thomas Hardy: if you half-close one eye and hold it up to the light, Homo Faber is basically The mayor of Casterbridge updated to the 1950s and done in stream of consciousness...

[tadad_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this in my twenties, it depressed the heck out of me, but I didn't want to stop reading. I suspect that, were I to read it now (many years later), Walter's mid-life crisis would hit home even more strongly...and probably depress me even more. :-)A previous reviewer made mention of a romantic comedy. I can't imagine a categorization any further from what I found. If anything, this is a Greek tragedy, full of all of the irony and inevitable despair of that genre.I can't say much about the writing style. I read this in German, which is not my native language nor am I fluent, and the mental translation process prevented any ability to assess that aspect of the book.

[kawgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When I was learning German, this is the first novel I read. The story was fascinating enough that I forgot my fear of reading an actual book in another language. An excellent story about the priorities we tend to make in modern life and where these decisions might lead us.

[stig_brantley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book would have been very easy to read in just a few hours. I liked the prose, however, so I decided to take my time. Walter Faber, the protagonist, is an existential, pragmatic engineer. He is mainly concerned with how things (machines mostly)work. He doesn't know about art and he isn't moved by experiences that move other people. He also doesn't care that he doesn't know about art or that he's not moved by what moves other people. He wouldn't even mention anything about it if he hadn't found himself in a situation where he was forced to think about it: he meets a young girl who he falls in love with over the course of about five days and she drags him to all sorts of museums and they watch sunsets together and have simile contests. Don't think, however, that this is a romantic comedy. Far from it. I think I only laughed once. I won't give away any of the plot: Frisch does that for you in the first 10 pages anyway so that there are no surprises. You know everything from the beginning. The intrigue comes from watching Faber's alien mind at work.I saw the Volker Schlondorf movie adaptation of this book a long time ago. I don't remember if I liked it or not. It's only available on VHS and it's out of print or else it'd be in my netflix queue. I do remember that Sam Shepard and Julie Delpy were the leads so they're who I pictured as I read, which worked quite well.

[jcbrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The main problem I have with Max Frisch's Homo Faber is its implausible Oedipus-like meeting of people. You truly need to suspend your belief. I see a similarity to Voltaire's Candide where the didactic need to show the reader certain events drives the story. Mr. Faber also learns that he doesn't live in the best of all possible worlds, a fact Frisch's Wirtschaftswunder generation only learned later when the American defeat in Vietnam crashed the world economy. Frisch's mechanics of life does not foresee the birth of complexity and systems thinking. Faber lives in a complicated and deterministic not a dynamic and complex world. While the story partially plays in South America, Faber isn't exposed to the butterfly effect.Overall, I am a bit disappointed as it does not live up to its reputation as a classic. What I liked most are the description of the different modes of transport. Faber flies, drives and navigates across the planet on his fateful journey.

[Radley Faulkner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book, with interesting development and juxtaposition of characters. Faber is truly a Holden Caulfield.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Echt een tegenvaller, na de lectuur van Stiller. De thematiek is boeiend genoeg: hyperrationalistisch technicus botst op het échte leven, wordt erdoor door elkaar geschud en gaat helemaal anders kijken anar de wereld. Maar de manier waarop dit wordt aangebracht is zo onwaarschijnlijk: 50-jarige wordt verliefd op 23-jarige, die later zijn dochter blijkt te zijn, en dan kort daarop sterft na een adderbeet; bovendien is de stijl zeer rudimentair, in korte, nukkige, onbewogen zinnen (bewust wellicht, als weergave van de nuchtere hoofdpersoon), dat het soms afstotend werkt. Kortom, een teleurstelling.

[praj05_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Nothing is harder than to accept oneself." - Max Frisch.

Walter Faber is a paradigm of collective identity v/s self-identity, rationality v/s irrationality and providence v/s concurrence; counter positioning free will. You cannot find yourself anywhere except in yourself. Frisch portrays the contradictory worlds of methodical reasonableness and the quandary of being a mortal. Walter believes in what he nurtures. As a technologist working for UNESCO, he lives in the present and connects with the world through scientific implications of his free will. Walter truly believes that it is mere a sequence of coincidences that fashions a man’s life, not fate. He defies the very nature of human sentiments sheltering his vulnerabilities through an itinerant lifestyle and transitory associations. Nevertheless, when circumstantial occurrences go beyond coherent justifications revealing the blatancy of Walter’s concealed emotions; the dichotomy of fate and coincidences are collided. Walter’s encounter with Herbert, his travel to the tobacco plantation, facing his uneasy past through Hannah and the sexual relation with Sabeth banishes Walter’s logic of concurrent consequences and imposes the idea of destiny. His obstinate belief that a man should not be held responsible for the actions he did not choose is shattered when guilt overrides his conscious after knowing Sabeth’s true identity. He appreciates the value of forgiveness, a concept which he had alienated himself from.

A man is a not a machine but an incongruous creature. Frisch talks about the influence of industrial age and its significance in etching human mentality. The evolution of scientific technologies has assured human beings the capabilities of capturing the materialistic wonders controlling every aspect of human survival.

Above all, however, the machine has no feelings; it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.

Walter’s fixation with the technology constantly asserts the conflict between the modern world and the so called primitive thought processes. To a spiritual mind, death is the ultimate liberation of a soul. Whereas in a scientific setting death is seen as a failure of the aortic pump. Frisch toys with the post-modernism attitude towards technology suggesting that even though technology can make life easier it cannot define the workings of human connections. Walter’s practicality in every decision shielded him from the absurdity of emotions and fear making him helpless and nauseated in his own personality, is analogous to the resolution of Antoine Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea:-

I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, 1 foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp posts of the bandstand and the Velleda, in the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects . . . how can I explain?.......... I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. (Jean Paul Sartre; Nausea)

The underplayed incestuous approach and the irony in Walter’s analysis on abortion as a logical outcome in a civilization, shows that even though ‘man plans’ the absurdity of fate makes technology a pitiable surrogate of human identity. Ultimately, Walter’s trepidation of death and emancipation from his social identity as an engineer, proves that “Man the Maker” relates to how an individual classifies oneself from a hollow world where one cannot suffer nothing.

[chwiggy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Max Frisch zeichnet ein spannendes Charakterbild zwischen Schuld, Sühne und Schicksal, zwischen Mann und Frau, zwischen Technik und Mystik.

[kthxy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ich bin mir nicht sicher, was ich mit diesem Buch anfangen soll. Seit längerem ist es das erste, das mich fesseln konnte. Der Stil, die Handlung, ja, sogar die Personen wirken ausreichend echt. Max Frisch scheint mir durch die Zeilen hindurch ein wahres Ekel gewesen zu sein, aber dieses Buch, ich liebe es ein bisschen. (Vielleicht gerade für zeitweilige Offensichtlichkeiten.)
Angefangen hab ich damit ja nur, weil ich eigentlich "Maya oder das Wunder des Lebens" wieder einmal lesen wollte, was mich an das Kartengeheimnis erinnerte, was mich an den Geschichtenverkäufer erinnerte, was mich an diese Wissenslücker erinnerte.

[squeakychu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a delight this book is! It begins with Walter Faber, a Swiss engineer who is deeply concerned with maintaining control of his environment while being aware that unforeseen circumstances keep popping up over which he has no control. We learn that Faber does not want to be tied down to any woman yet he fancies himself a womanizer. He embarks on a business trip, freeing himself from his current girlfriend and trying to cast off any lingering guilt. At the same time, Faber reminisces about Anna, his love of long ago. Very tight and clever writing takes us back to a time in which he was very much involved with Anna. We later learn about a serious situation that develops in his current life that directly relates back to that relationship with Anna. The writing style is one I love. There is nothing frivolous in the tale as every sentence leads us more deeply into the protagonist’s story. Frisch's writing in this novel so much reminds me of that of [Tim O'Brien] in [[Tomcat in Love]] as both present biting humor in an understated way. Frisch loves exclamation points. They are tossed into his writing with relative abandon. I love that as I do it, too!!I found this novel so thoroughly entertaining that I’m about to look for more works by the same author. I was stunned by the ending of this book and recommend that readers come to it fresh and with not much knowledge of what will happen. In that way, you’ll be able to take full advantage of this excellent storyteller's offering.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

And now here at last is a real book for grown-ups. Intelligent and utterly unsentimental, Homo Faber would, I feel, have been wasted on me if I'd read it ten years ago; now it strikes me as extraordinary. (This is unlike most novels, which, if not actually aimed at people in their late teens and early twenties, seem to resonate most strongly with that intense and exciting age group.)As it happens, Walter Faber, the central character of this novel, does not read novels at all. He can't see the point. A technician for UNESCO, Faber builds things, records them, and analyses them. He believes in logic, reason, facts, brute statistics. A machine impresses him in a way that a human does not, because ‘it feels no fear and no hope, which only disturb, it has no wishes with regard to the result, it operates according to the pure logic of probability.’ Faber has few close male friends; women he can't relate to at all. Too emotional. ‘I'm not cynical,’ he explains. ‘I'm merely realistic, which is something women can't stand.’I called her a sentimentalist and arty crafty. She called me Homo Faber.His one serious relationship ended in divorce years ago. She scorned his beloved technology as ‘the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.’ (And she, by contrast, was an archaeologist: ‘I stick the past together,’ she says in one of the novel's few moments of unsubtlety.)I can imagine many readers finding Faber very unlikeable, even monstrous; and yet I feel desperately defensive towards him, perhaps because he reminds me of my father. Actually he reminds me of all fathers – there is an air of generalised daddishness about him, and this is not coincidental: the notion of paternity is crucial to the book.‘I like functionalism,’ Faber says. He has a prose style to match. This is not to say that it is dry, or clunky, or unartful, because it is none of those things. The style is astonishingly telegraphic, elliptical, Faber narrating the facts that he considers important. The effect is staccato but wonderful; an extreme example here from a virtuoso section set in Havana:My lust for looking.My desire.Vacuum between the loins.I exist now only for shoeshine boys!The pimps.The ice-cream vendors.Their vehicle: a combination of old pram and mobile canteen added to half a bicycle, a baldachin with rusty curtains; a carbide lamp; all around, the green twilight dotted with their flared skirts.The lilac moon.Often you are forced to read between the lines to understand what is really going on, and sometimes this reaches such a pitch that one has the impression of having experienced a scene twice. All the time Faber is writing to understand what has happened, and to justify his behaviour to himself. He can hardly accept the novelistic coincidences that the story involves: this cannot have happened. How was I to know. What else could I have done. The probability was minuscule. These were the facts as I knew them.I am not mentioning the plot because it shouldn't be spoiled. Which seems strange, because we are given all the main facts quite early on. But part of the point of the book is discovering that the facts are not always, after all, the most important thing.It's not often I really, really love books in translation. This is not because of any hipsterish misconception that you're not getting the "real" book, it's just that one of the things I most enjoy analysing when I read is the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of sentence construction and vocabulary choice, and this is all very different when you are reading the words of a translator. (Not that translators are not adept at this too – they are – but their motives and concerns are to do with fidelity to someone else's idea rather than their own, and this difference is fundamental.) But here I was riveted by the technique on display.There is a moment where Faber recalls being on a beach in Greece with a girl. The two of them have a competition of similes: describing what they can see in terms of what it looks like. This is new ground for scientific-minded Faber, but he gets into it, and the paragraph rolls on for pages:Then we found we could make out the surf on the seashore. Like beer froth. Sabeth thought, like a ruche! I took back my beer froth and said, like fibreglass. But Sabeth didn't know what fibreglass was. Then came the first rays of the sun over the sea: like a sheaf, like spears, like cracks in a glass, like a monstrance, like photos of electron bombardment. But there was only one point for each round; it was no use producing half a dozen similes. Soon after this the sun rose, dazzling. Like metal spurting out of a furnace, I thought: Sabeth said nothing and lost a point….It's hard to describe the effect this long passage has on you, coming as it does after 150 pages in which I don't think a single simile had been deployed. To me it felt like being hit by a truck. It's one of the most unusual and powerful devices I can remember, in terms of constructing a novel, and the reason is that the passage coincides exactly with a moment of exquisite emotion both for Faber the character, experiencing it, and for Faber the narrator, remembering it. There is something technically brilliant going on in here.There are so many other aspects to this superb novel that I haven't even touched on: its comments on the war, its deliberate and wide-ranging internationalism, its precise descriptive scenes. The story is clear-eyed and matter-of-fact and this has a cumulative effect that is quite devastating – heart-breaking, really. And yet for all that, what I am left with is this unexpected, life-affirming feeling…a renewed appreciation of what existence entails:To be alive: to be in the light. Driving donkeys around somewhere (like that old man in Corinth) – that's all our job amounts to! The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.

[petroglyph_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one was a relatively quick read, and one that I very much enjoyed. Many other reviews exist of this book (even on LT) so I’ll just focus on the things I particularly liked. Much of the book reads like an account of care-free, leisurely tourism through Mexico and Europe. The main character has trouble engaging with art, emotions and non-calculatable motivations that drive other people. Usually, these characters get stereotyped into unrelatability, but here I thought the main character’s confrontation with other humans, art and sunrises through mid-life crisis romance felt fairly genuine and sometimes even endearing (YMMV though).Another thing I liked very much is the way that the layering of focalizers added to the characterization. Normally, the accumulation of occasional meta-comments and the choice of what the narrator focuses on or introduces would read like a clumsy omniscient narrator failing to conceal their set-up of the big twist, a joke with the punch-line set up telegraphed way too obviously. But since the book is framed as the main character retelling their experiences after the fact, the clumsiness comes across as self-delusion, a blindness to certain areas of life that are entirely in line with the kind of person the main character is. I’m glad I read this. It’s a pity I didn’t get to it sooner.

[brianfannin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Third German book of the year, but probably the only one that qualifies as a legitimate adult-type novel. At times confusing for a non-native speaker. The coincidences and revelations may seem like stuff that I didn't properly understand, but a second look and, "Yeah, this really is what happened". Really good stuff. Highly recommended if one is learning the language and wants something a bit more challenging.