Frisch, Max

London and New York. 1959. Abelard-Schuman. 1st Edition. Very Good.No Dustjacket. Translated from the German by Michael Bullock. 200 pages. hardcover. . keywords: Literature Translated Germany Switzerland. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Travelling on a UNESCO mission to an underdeveloped South American country, Faber, the man who distrusts emotions as ‘fatigue phenomena' and believes only in the calculable, is involved in a series of incalculable events by which he meets and becomes the lover of his own illegitimate daughter, Sabeth. Taking leave from his work, Faber joins Sabeth in a trip through France and Italy, at the end of which she is to rejoin her mother in Athens, He does not suspect her identity until a chance remark on the way reveals the maiden name of her mother, twice married and divorced since Faber last saw her, Sabeth and Faber are thrown into one another's arms by the overwhelming emotion experienced during a lunar eclipse, a cosmic event which Faber of course tries to dismiss as an easily explicable astronomical phenomenon, blinding himself to the impact it has on the more primitive levels of his mind. Through the jottings in Faber's journal (by which he tries to give clarity to what has happened to him), we learn that he is a man who in his youth said ‘No' to experience. He had loved Hanna, Sabeth's mother (and it is she who has nicknamed him Homo Faber, Man the Maker), enough to accept responsibility; he had been unable to commit himself wholly as friend, lover, husband, or father, just as for twenty years he has been unable to acknowledge his guilt for these failings, Caught now, by the very chance he despises so much, in a tragedy of positively classical horror, Faber at last experiences all of these things. For life does not let itself be denied, save at the price of life. inventory #29463