Homo Faber: A Report by Max Frisch Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Homo Faber: A Report
Book Review: Oedipus Max
Summary: 4 Stars
From the author of I'm Not Stiller, Homo Faber is the tale of a brilliant but socially frigid engineer who, during a Trans-Atlantic voyage, attempts to jazz up his drab Apollonian existence with a shot of some intense Dionysian lust, and instead finds himself in a nightmarish scenario of...um... Greek proportions, in which some absolutely no-no hanky panky occurs, leaving one person figuratively blind and another literally dead. A great, great story about many things, chief among them identity, and how that changes when one enters the business called love. Once you've finished, you might considering going to your local video store and checking out the equally thoughtful and provoking film version, "Voyager", starring Sam Shepard and Julie DelpyBook Review: Oh my God!What a horrendous book!
Summary: 1 Stars
I also read this book in German, also at "high school" (in Luxembourg). I found it was one of the worst books I ever read, and the more often i read it, the more i hated it. This books tells the story of a man who has built a perfect-life fassade and shows how this fassade crumbles. This happenes by a series of really impossible random events, which in real life have a probability of 0.00000 to happen. The whole book is based on that. That makes the whole book completely unbelievable (in the first sense). Ugh...I was really disgusted that someone could write such a piece of...well let's say rubbish.Book Review: Ought to be rated PG-42...
Summary: 5 Stars
--because to truly appreciate this beautiful novel you really need to have lived through at least four decades or so.
It strikes me that so much great literature goes unread by those to whom it is ultimately directed. The `classics' are generally written by writers in their 40s and 50s and end up primarily being read by teenagers. Sure, you can get something out of these texts then, but theres no way a 20-year-old can really understand *Homo Faber*--a novel about a middle-aged man confronting his own mortality, decay, & disillusionment. Death is still largely an abstraction to a man of twenty, it hasnt yet entered his bones, love is still possible, youth is still a contemporary, a 20-year-old doesnt yet know what he's going to lose, what he's never going to get back, how badly he's going to miss it.
*Homo Faber* is a classic text of midlife crisis. It's a shame that so many of us have stopped reading altogether when we reach the age it can do us the most good...that we stop reading the classics, anyway, or feel they are irrelevant to our lives, or merely `stuff we already read back when we were in school.' A novel like *Homo Faber* is, to my mind, a religious text in the best sense of that term--in this case, a kind of updated Ecclesiastes.
I can only wonder what the original German text is like because this translation is absolutely stunning, rising to the level of sheer poetry. Almost every line is an ice-dagger into the heart. Such a beautiful, sad, and true book...and everything that needed saying said in 212 pages. Did Max Frisch ever win a Nobel Prize for Literature when the Nobel Prize still meant something? Cause on the basis of this book alone, he should have won two!!
Book Review: Super Cool book
Summary: 5 Stars
I have read this book as per recommendation of my Belgian friend. I have never heard of Max Frisch, but I am so grateful for this masterpiece. I didn't put down the book till I have finished it. "Coincidences" in life are not avoidable.
Really must read. Bravo!
cheers from Slovakia
Book Review: Technology, Life, Love and Irony
Summary: 5 Stars
This report is a difficult lovestory. The dry life of a technologist faints more and more during a love-relationship with his own daughter. The world of probability and dull nature changes into the world of "family" and love, death and warm rain. Max Frisch did already a wonderful job in the original, german version, but even translated it will enchant you. I give this book 5 stars, because it is "eyeglue" and won't let you go. It made it happen that I can see the nature in a different way and it is still influencing my life. The end was completely shocking, but it was the right one. This book is recommended for people who want to read an experience and not just a pulp pamphlet.