The anonymous narrator defines himself through the stories he improvises. In his 1964 novel Meine Name sei Gantenbein, which made its first appearance in this country under the title A Wilderness of Mirrors (1965) and now reappears under the title Gantenbein (though with the translation by Michael Bullock otherwise unchanged) Frisch invented a highly unusual imaginative game to play with the reader. Once upon a time … Stories are sketches projected into the past, games of the imagination which we pass off as reality. Perhaps there is no other way to express experience than by narrating events, ie stories, as if our experience sprang from stories … Experience wants to make itself intelligible and so it invents a reason for itself, preferably a past. Not that experience, anyway, is identical with external events:Ī single external event can serve a thousand experiences. He believes that what is most important is what can never be formulated: experience always eludes the statements we make about it. His fiction is his attempt to find himself and keep faith with himself. ‘With each new piece of work,’ said Max Frisch in a 1961 interview, ‘I have the naive feeling that now, thank heavens, I am getting to grips with a fundamentally new theme – only to discover sooner or later that everything which does not end in fundamental failure possesses fundamentally the same theme.’ The central theme in his fiction is the difficulty first of locating the self and then of keeping faith with it.
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