Max Frisch - Homo Faber. A Report (epub)

Penguin Modern Classics

The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

MAX FRISCH, the son of an architect, was born in Zurich in 1911. In 1933 he was forced by economic circumstances to abandon the study of German literature at Zurich Literature and became a journalist. Renewing his education, he became a trained architect in 1943, but before this he had written his first published work, Leaves from a Knapsack (1942), while doing service with the Swiss Frontier Guard. In 1952 Frisch spent a year in the United States and Mexico on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1958 he became the first foreigner to be awarded the Büchner Prize of the German Academy for Language and Poetry. Max Frisch died in 1991.