Bøker av Max Frisch

The novel 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, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It's really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It's also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people's homes only to burn them all down. It's a plague. And we don't know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can't be arsonists. They're too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in - even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

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.

A renowned novel of self-deceit and self-acceptance. Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: "I'm not Stiller!" He claims that his name is Jim White, and that he has been jailed under false charges and under the wrong identity. To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by "the morbid impulse to convince," but no one believes him. This is a harrowing account-part Kafka, part Camus-of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I'm Not Stiller has come to be recognized as one of the major post-war works of fiction and a masterpiece of German literature.

A playfully postmodern novel exploring questions of identity from a major Swiss writer.   A man walks out of a bar and is later found dead at the wheel of his car. On the basis of a few overheard remarks and his own observations, the narrator of this novel imagines the story of this stranger, or rather two alternative stories based on two identities the narrator has invented for him, one under the name of Enderlin, the other under the name Gantenbein.

A fresh translation of the second volume of Max Frisch‿s diaries. By the time Swiss author Max Frisch published the second volume of his diaries or sketchbooks, he had achieved international recognition as a writer and dramatist. In this volume, he develops his version of the literary diary as a mosaic of musings on architecture and writing, travelogue, autobiography, and political insight. He considers Cold War tensions as well as the civil rights and anti‿Vietnam War movements in the United States. Now middle-aged himself, he looks squarely at men‿s evolving attitude to life, love, sex, women, and status. And for all the idyllic descriptions of his new home in Berzona, Frisch becomes increasingly critical of his native Switzerland, in particular the crackdowns on left-wingers and protestors, and receives abuse for his stance. Based on the second German edition that reinstated material that had been removed from the original 1972 version, this fresh and definitive translation brings an important mid-twentieth-century European classic back to life. Â

A new translation of one of the earliest volumes of Max Frisch's innovative notebooks. Throughout his life, the great Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911-1991) kept a series of diaries, or sketchbooks, as they came to be known in English. First published in English translation in the 1970s, these sketchbooks played a major role in establishing Frisch as, according to the New York Times, "the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors." His diaries, said the Times, "read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries." Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbooks, 1946-1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count Öderland. Whatever experience he chronicles in the sketchbook--whether it's a Bastille Day party, an Italian fish market, or a tightrope display amid the ruins of Frankfurt or an afternoon by Lake Zurich with Bertolt Brecht, to take just a few examples--his keen dramatist's eye immerses the reader in the setting while also probing the deeper significance and motivations underlying the scene. This new translation will serve to draw out the immediacy and contemporary quality of Frisch's observations from the shadow of his status as a classic author, bringing his work to life for a new audience.

A screenplay that was developed from an episode in the author's 1964 novel "Gantenbein", or "A Wilderness of Mirrors".

Texts include selections from "Sketchbook 1946-1949," "I'm Not Stiller," and "Homo Faber: A Report," The plays includes selections from "Now They are Singing Again," "Don Juan," and "Andorra," The essays and speeches include "Emigrants," "Foreignization I," and "Switzerland as Heimat,".

Reissue of this Methuen classic to tie in with a major new production

New York... I HATE IT... I LOVE IT... I DON'T KNOW...". These are the reflections of Max Frisch, writing from his apartment in the Big Apple near the end of the twentieth century. He kept a series of sketchbooks to record his reactions to events of the time and people he encountered in his daily life. This title presents these sketches.

The protagonist has just turned thirty and is engaged to be married and about to start work as a teacher. Frightened by the idea of settling down, he journeys to the Alps in a do-or-die effort to climb the unclimbed North Ridge, and by doing so prove he is not ordinary.

A play that celebrates not only the theater as a form of self-expression but also the human condition in its potential and limitations, showcasing both comic and tragic outcomes that define our lives.

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

This volume contains three of Max Frisch's plays in which he charts the clash between the individual and society. Beyond the deliberately grotesque situation, an important ingredient of each play is language.