Max Frisch Libri

"Il romanzo di Max Frisch, Il mio nome sia Gantenbein, inizia con la morte, accidentale, di Felix Enderlin, che risulterà poi l'alter ego del protagonista principale, Theo Gantenbein. Lo si immagina cieco, ma potrebbe essere una sua astuzia per sorvegliare la moglie Lilla, con la quale ha un rapporto difficile. Intorno a Lilla si muove anche Svoboda, il primo marito; mentre Gantenbein frequenta volentieri Camilla, una manicure servizievole, alla quale racconta storie sempre diverse, fino all'ultima, macabra, di un cadavere ripescato nella Limmat. Frisch mette in guardia il lettore dall'accettare passivamente la finzione. Così si spiega il passaggio dalla prima persona alla terza, dato che i personaggi sono soltanto proiezioni di una stessa identità, quella dell'io narrante. La figura proteiforme di Lilla viene presentata sotto le spoglie più mutevoli: attrice, contessa, medico, incarnazione della Bauci di classica memoria o donna di casa. Frisch sente il problema della personalità, del suo essere labile e indefinito, con la stessa intensità di Pirandello; questa è la chiave interpretativa del primo periodo della sua attività letteraria, dal romanzo Stiller alla pièce Biografia." Roberto Fertonani

Ingegnere pragmatico e razionale, privo di radici affettive che lo ancorino a un luogo o a una famiglia, indifferente a tutto ciò che non è spiegabile con la logica e insensibile a tutto ciò che è istintivo, religioso umanistico. Autentico campione della civiltà tecnologica, si ostina a non vedere ciò che non può capire. Nel corso di una crociera, Faber incontra una ragazza cui si lega sentimentalmente. Quando scopre in lei la figlia mai conosciuta, è ormai troppo tardi.

The screenplay "Zurich Transit" was developed from an episode in the novel Gantenbein, published in 1964: 'A story for Camilla: of a man who decides several times to change his life but, of course, never succeeds ...' Yet one day he, Theo Ehrismann, returns from a trip abroad and reads in the paper his own obituary. He arrives just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, especially not to his wife: 'How does one say that he is alive?' Max Frisch counters the traditional dramaturgy based on causality with a dramaturgy of coincidence. 'Life,' Max Frisch said in 1965, 'is the sum of events that happen by chance, and it always could as well have turned out differently; there is not a single action or omission that does not allow for variables in the future.'

A reissue of a comic and tragic play that asks just how much of our life we could--or would--change if we got another chance. In this play by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, a middle-aged behavioral researcher Kürmann is given the opportunity to start his life over at any point he chooses and change his decisions and actions in matters both serious and mundane--He could save his marriage, become politically active, take better care of his health, or even change the color of his living room furniture. Despite his intention to apply the wisdom he has acquired with age, Kürmann finds himself inexorably trapped in the same decisions. Ultimately proving fatal, Kürmann's life game interrogates how much of our own path is shaped by seemingly random factors and how much is in fact predetermined by our own limited, conditioned selves. The play's central idea--that our lives are nothing but a self-conscious play with imaginary identities--is brilliantly captured in Biography's dramaturgical form, setting up a theatre rehearsal as the metaphor for the endless possibilities and variables of the game of life. Frisch's own revised, dramatically heightened version of his play celebrates not only the theatre as a form of self-expression but also the human condition in all its potential and limitations as it showcases both comic and tragic outcomes that define all our lives.

The daily journal of a giant of German literature, touching subjects ranging from everyday life to the political and social conditions in East Germany as viewed from West Berlin. Max Frisch (1911-91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a "scribbling book," but rather a book "fully composed." The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch's literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the "private things" he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch's journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world. From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946-49 and 1966-71. Observations about the writer's everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others. Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin.

"A luminous parable . . . A masterpiece." The New York Times

Tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion.

Mit seinen Romanen Stiller und Homo faber führte Max Frisch in den fünfziger Jahren ein Thema in die deutsche Literatur ein, das bis heute von großer Aktualität ist: die Frage nach der Identität des Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Auch seine Stücke sind Versuche, diese Grundfrage zu beantworten, die sein ganzes Werk bestimmt und ihm seine Einheit gibt.