"I have been serving up stories to some sort of public, and in these stories I have, I know, laid myself bare—to the point of non-recognition."

So Frisch writes in "Montauk" (1975), a novel-like account of a weekend spent among the sand dunes with an American girlfriend and a golden opportunity for some confessional writing, which, however, never comes. Frisch is always impersonal, never more so than when he writes about himself. That his novels and his plays often seem the work of two different men makes him all the harder to get hold of.

His plays (such as the frequently produced "Andorra," 1961, and "The Firebugs," 1958), although various in subject matter all have about them something of the political parable in the Brechtian manner. Each has its moral, in the sense that the problem it poses, in theory at least, is capable of solution. The problem is some sort of political or social aberration; the moral is that we better do something about it. (Frisch is a socialist of the democratic variety.)

His novels, on the other hand, are each different in form, though similar in subject. Each has as its central character either someone who tries to escape from himself ("I'm Not Stiller," 1954) or who writhes in the nets of definition others cast over him ("A Wilderness of Mirrors," 1964) or who finds out, too late, that he is not what he took himself to be ("Homo Faber," 1957). These novels, like Frisch, are elusive. Their ironies are reflexive, à la Svevo, rather than aggressive, à la Brecht. Each has, not a moral, but multiple meanings of indeterminable portent. The problems they pose are not solvable, but built into the human situation. Remove the problem, and you remove the humanity, which the novels, including "Man in the Holocene," have in plenty.

This new novel is akin to the plays in moving like a parable, and akin to the other novels in its absence of a moral. Above all, it has about it the aspect of a classic, not because it imitates an ancient author, but because of its lucidity and elegance of form, its severe impersonality, its restraint, its universality. You don't say to yourself, as you read it, "this might have happened"; you say, "this happens, inevitably, wherever there are humans." (p. 1)

The life of this book lies in its many concrete details, in their sequence, recurrences and combinations. They are engrossing enough in their own right so that you are not likely to pull back, while taking them in, to ask what they all amount to. But once you have finished and the novel begins to turn over and over in your mind, as it will, you might want to tack or tape a moral or two on it….

I should also mention that, as far as I can tell, this luminous parable of indeterminable purport is also a masterpiece. (p. 31)