The 3 best books by the fascinating Max Frisch

Let's start with the hideous comparisons. Two world-class German writers. Two authors of the XNUMXth century in the heart of the most turbulent Europe of the modern era.

Thomas Mann he swallowed two wars and two defeats of his German homeland. Max frisch, Swiss (therefore, more neutral per se) “only” knew the Second World War and the fight against Nazism. Mann was driven to be a chronicler of defeat and of that very German existentialist effort to survive and end up escaping the worst. Frisch, for his part, always flew over the sinister events of war from a distance and devoted himself to the task of reconstruction from a literary point of view. Without abandoning the political intention at times, but focusing more on the narrative per se.

You may have to see that Frisch's literature is that of a mature guy. Most of his work is well after the end of the war in 45. The writer who was between 30 and 40 was able to gather youth experiences between ideological and warlike horrors, but he hardly transferred possible impressions directly to his literature .

Curious differences in two of the great German writers of the XNUMXth century. Creative wealth to accompany gray days, if not black ones. With their common homeland, Germany, always in the center of Europe. Not only from the simple geographical point of view but as something more neuralgic of a Europe in need of evolution to get out of spirals of nationalist violence.

But perhaps it has extended the comparison between both writers too much. Because as I say, Frisch is very different, his narrative is something else. In his novels above all we find an existentialist intention, loaded with philosophy and humanism. But always balancing the scale as only the greats know how to do, with lively, entertaining actions.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Max Frisch

Montauk

Writing about the writer and dedication to writing is a wonderful enveloping action that, if you know how to carry it out, as is this case, takes us into the skies and abysses of creation not only literary but also artistic and vital in general.

Spring 1974. A famous writer, inspired by the author himself, is in the United States on a promotional tour accompanied by Lynn, a young employee of the publishing house. During these days they start a very special relationship and, before he returns to Europe, they decide to spend a weekend together in Montauk, a remote city on Long Island.

His time with Lynn awakens in the writer memories that had been relegated and enlivens old reflections about success, life, death, love, his books and how he has worried over and over again with the same questions. Montauk it constitutes an aesthetic legacy in which the author himself wonders about the meaning of his work.

Montauk

I'm not stiller

One of the recurring arguments in suspense novels is that of amnesia, of the identity problem that is as good for a spy as for a mother who cannot find her daughter and whom no one believes.

The idea, in the hands of an intellectual, takes on greater meaning and the tension itself, of the thriller around the future of the protagonist of the moment, much deeper doubts hang about human nature, existence, the perception of reality and all luck of approaches that overwhelm and fascinate.

A man who claims to be called Mr. White and to be an American is arrested by the Swiss authorities accused of being Herr Stiller, who disappeared in Zurich years ago. At the urging of his defense attorney, he writes his life in a diary, as he attends, amazed, a parade of witnesses to the identity he denies: Stiller's wife, his friends, his brother ...

I'm not stiller

Man appears in the Holocene

That God exists when there are no longer men who can imagine it or that the vault was invented by the Romans are things that should be remembered, and with greater insistence when it is the lonely and senile man who thinks them, faced with the anteroom of death, like the old Mr. Geiser.

Isolated from the world in his home in the canton of Ticino, at the mercy of the climatic caprice and under the protection of his diminished physical forces, already in decline and towards the abyss, Geiser faces the most resounding loneliness with the contemplation of the minute daily events: the regularity the mail bus, the visits of the solar researcher, the Minestrone soup to be heated, the blonde butcher, the fire salamander or the old cat that no longer catches mice.

And to grasp the memory of those fragments that make up an entire life and, ultimately, those that constitute the human trace in history, he papers the walls with the pages of an old dictionary, which remind him of how the first settlers of the Alps were. or how the golden segment is drawn: those things that should not be forgotten.

"Man Appears in the Holocene" represents a brilliant literary pulse against loneliness and death; It is a tremendous interior monologue in which the repetition of the gestures and the inexorable passing of the hours are confirmed.

5/5 - (6 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.