Volume 28, Number 14 · September 24, 1981
The Flood Next Time
By D.J. Enright
Man in the Holocene
by Max Frisch, translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 113 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Triptych
by Max Frisch, translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 82 pp., $8.95
Stiller, published in 1954 and translated into English as I'm Not Stiller in 1958, carried Max Frisch into the class of international writers, eliciting comparisons with Kafka and Thomas Mann that may have been more automatic than reasoned. I'm Not Stiller could have been called 'I'm Not Swiss—Or Not Entirely.' 'In Germany they click their heels, in the East they rub their hands together, in Switzerland they light a cigar and strain after a pose of surly equality as though nothing could happen in this country to a man who behaved correctly.' The eponymous (or not) hero maintains that he is not a Swiss, but a man called Sam White, an American of German origin. The implication is that anyone who doesn't 'grasp the opportunity of being Swiss as a boon' must be either crazy or criminal, possibly a spy. You can scold Switzerland for its complacency and self-righteousness, for its materialism, for what Stiller (generalizing from his small, clean prison cell) calls its 'oppressive adequacy,' but you can hardly reproach it with the kind of calamities and evils caused by or occurring in some other countries. There would seem little chance for budding Bölls or Grasses among its German-speaking authors!
Review, 2529 words
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