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    Man In The Holocene
    Man In The Holocene
    Man In The Holocene
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    Man In The Holocene

    By Max Frisch

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Frisch charts the crumbling landscape of an old man’s consciousness as he slips away from himself toward death and reintegration with the age-old history of our planet. A “luminous parable...a masterpiece” (New York Times Book Review). Translated by Geoffrey Skelton. Illustrations. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 1, 1994
    ISBN9780547971063
    Man In The Holocene
    Author

    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.

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    • 3/5
      This was a very strange reading experience: a loose sequence of descriptive and narrative sections, encyclopaedic articles, bible excerpts and memories. It takes a while before you realize that the book revolves around the older man, Herr Geiser, a confused loner who lives in a valley in southern Switzerland, not far from the Italian border. Geyser is clearly intrigued by the signs of decline in his environment (landslides due to constant rain, ants in his house, bus connections that have been interrupted), but also in himself: he has difficulty remembering things and doing the most basic actions. He tries to hold on tightly to what he once knew and focuses on geographical and historical articles and bible fragments (from Genesis) about the earliest geological and biological history; Frisch also inserts these articles and fragments into the text, with the original layout (up to and including texts in gothic lettering).Geyser also ventures into a rather perilous trip through the mountains, trying to resume a journey that he used to undertake. We also get a flashback to a rather difficult climb of the Matterhorn, 50 years before. Certainly towards the end there seems to be something seriously wrong with the man, he sometimes seems unconscious for hours, and eventually people (including his daughter) appear who speak to him like a child.As a writer, Frisch keeps himself in the background, but his seemingly purely descriptive report harshly portrays the dementing process of an old man who is more or less aware of what is happening. And also the broader metaphor, the reference to the ruthless power of erosion, to the nullity of man, (which only ‘appeared in the Holocene’, so very late in the history of the earth) finally becomes clear. What is a human life? What is man himself and can he withstand the enormous power of nature and time? Frisch makes his reader sweat in this philosophical parable.
    • 4/5
      Man in the Holocene first appeared in the New Yorker in 1980 and garnered lofty praise from the New York Times: "masterpiece" and one of the "Best Books of 1980". It's very short, about the time it takes to watch an episode of James Burke's Connections, and has lots of pictures and blocks of text pasted in from old Encyclopedia's (original fonts and all) giving it a heightened sense of realism, a realism which matches the beautifully evocative descriptions of the Swiss Alps in a rainstorm. It concerns an old man alone in a cottage, in a remote Swiss valley, whose grasp on himself and time begins to erode, for reasons that don't become clear until the end. It's a philosophical novel about time, age, permanence of type versus the temporary individual. For example he considers the extinction of dinosaurs while watching a salamander crawl across the floor (salamanders probably descended from dinosaurs). At the end of his life, he is watching his body and mind erode and near extinction, yet he is also "aware", in a way that is physically expressed by pasting encyclopedia articles on the wall, that life continues onward through the epochs even while the individuals die off. Writing, then, becomes for Max Frisch a vehicle for expressing immortality - not because the individual text will last forever (it doesn't), but text is a symbolic way of expressing the idea of immortality which ensures it continuance. It's a beautiful book, although I can't figure out why he roasted the cat.
    • 4/5
      A book about a Swiss civil servant’s retirement and descent into Alzheimer’s disease. He develops, ominously, a passion for organizing, and ends up lost in a long walk in the woods.

    Book preview

    Man In The Holocene - Max Frisch

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