Jan-Maat's Reviews > Homo Faber

What a difference a reread makes. Now I want to seize everybody in turn by the lapels and say 'read this book and then read it again!'.

Unusually I know when I had the book for the first time, the Easter of 1995, there's an inscription in my Mother's handwriting on a flyleaf with that date. Now I've read it again, but also read it for the first time. You can't read the same book twice since you never can be the same reader.

The narrator doesn't see things that way. He is told: "technology..the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it...technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance, for example, of diluting it by speed, so that we don't have to experience it...the technologist's worldlessness...technologists try to live without death". However the narrator's dissertation on Maxwell's demon was uncompleted. Life intervenes. The world intervenes. Repeatedly. The willfully blind man is forced to see.

Max Frisch was Swiss. This novel written in 1957. As with Dürrenmatt's The Judge and His Hangman the war is in the background souring the lives of men who go profoundly off the rails years later.

I like the opening to this book very much. I get a good sense of the main character, the time and his way of life. Brief images are very powerful. From the first we see how the narrator has lost sense of himself. He's on the verge of a breakdown but can't see it. He hangs back from revelations the reader perceives. He transfers his own sudden, inexplicable, oddness to his around him. His past opens up and swallows him whole.

Homo Faber is the title. What does man fabricate if not his own tragedy.

Rereading there is a sudden sharpness in the descriptions of places. I smell an ocean I've never seen, see the oozing red mud of a continent I've never stepped foot on and my stomach feels as though I've smoked too many cigars. The disrupted, interrupted narrative works to give the effect of being in his mind, increasingly discontinuous and illustrates his ignorance of himself. The man who made himself does not know himself. The narrator talks about cybernetics but is deaf and blind to the feedback. Nowadays we can give tragedy a technologist's name and call it systems collapse.