The precision-minded Swiss have never been famous for grand gesture or passionate utterance. It is as if exposure to the mighty contours of the land has over generations pruned back the national soul and turned its energies inward….

Out of this mountain fastness comes novelist, dramatist, and perennial Nobel candidate Max Frisch …, whose career has been one long assault upon repression, self-satisfaction, and bourgeois right-mindedness. Frisch—the Swiss who would not be Swiss—has done everything in his power to throw off the burden of his heritage. In the forty years since he quit architecture for writing, he has expressed himself with great inventiveness upon a single theme: the near-impossibility of living truthfully. He determined early on that the will to self-deception acts on the character as powerfully and almost as inevitably as gravity acts on the body. From his first major novel, I'm Not Stiller …, right up through the just-published novella, Bluebeard, he has argued that the self is not a given, that love is anything but the voluptuous surrender in a TV ad, and that it was the imperialistic ego that Blake named as "The invisible worm / That flies in the night." (p. 32)

For all its formal alteration, Frisch's work reveals an underlying consistency. The structural and stylistic shifts mark his maturing, the varying of his concerns, his need for increasingly direct statement. The man grows, but he is the same man. (p. 33)

Slim, as exquisitely crafted as any of his other works, [Bluebeard] is at once a stride forward and a return to certain former tendencies. Dr. Felix Schaad has been acquitted of the murder of Rosalinde Z., a prostitute and one of his seven former wives. The narrative consists of the obsessive replaying of the trial in Schaad's mind. Try as he may, he cannot silence the testimony. (pp. 34-5)

It is not clear from the testimony or Schaad's behavior whether he has or has not committed the crime. What does emerge from the various accounts is that he has lived his life as a supremely egotistical creature. As the testimony comes to an end, Schaad quite suddenly breaks. He rushes back to his home town and makes a confession at the police station. The town is nowhere near the scene of the crime, though, psychologically speaking, it is the very place…. Having made the confession, Schaad drives his car into a tree in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. While he is in the hospital, news comes that the real murderer has been arrested. But this makes no difference to the now-speechless Schaad. He has discovered his guilt. He did not murder Rosalinde, but he could have. The murder was a specific event, but his guilt is a condition of the soul….

Bluebeard has been executed with the sharp geometrical inevitability of a perfect combination shot. Frisch is not so much returning to earlier themes as he is bringing the preoccupations of a lifetime under a more calculated and intense pressure. Eliot's remark, that each new masterpiece changes our relation to the masterpieces of the past, can be applied to this newest addition to Frisch's oeuvre. Bluebeard suggests that Frisch's zeal for serious, difficult subjects has not abated, that those of us who prophesied silence were premature. His tidings are no cheerier than usual, but we have never looked to Frisch for cheer. He has always been there to remind us that there is no simple prescription for truthful living, and that happiness is that point in geometry where parallel lines melt. (p. 35)