Rain has been falling for nearly a week in the Swiss canton of Ticino as Max Frisch's short, fragmentary and deeply disturbing novel [Man in the Holocene] opens…. Whatever the truth may be (and truth—as opposed to fact—is elusive through most of the book)…. It is a time for turning in upon oneself, for cultivating in isolation the grim disciplines of survival.

Frisch's hero, Geiser, is an old man, living alone on an Alpine slope….

When [Geiser] has a stroke and dies, the reader is relieved at the novel's two final pages which give reassurance that life otherwise goes on as before.

But if he is a microcosm, Geiser is also a clearly delineated individual—a bit fussy and literal-minded but quite amiable and, at the beginning of the novel, obviously intelligent and capable. Frisch tells his story as Geiser might tell it himself, in a rather stolid, deadpan prose. Frisch's writing is a sort of poetry, but a poetry of the mind rather than the senses—sparse and austere, with every detail chosen for its resonances. These resonances emerge, remarkably, from a style not unlike that of the dictionaries and encyclopedias which are an integral part of the novel and which also have a resonance.

Man in the Holocene is brief and very tightly focused—one central character and a few shadowy figures in the background. The author makes no statement in his own voice, and many of his statements are taken bodily from the impersonal writings of others. Yet this brief, seemingly unimaginative account of a few rainy days in the life of an old man is an intensely personal statement, embodying vast epochs of time, a whole world and all the creatures that have lived and died in it, balancing the terror of unimaginable catastrophe with the serene reassurance that ultimately it doesn't really matter. Man in the Holocene is a small book but a major achievement.