preface
Just two days ago I’ve finished this book for the second time after having read it the first time around 2 years ago during high school.
As it’s always with reads, that are not incredibly shallow, one comes back to them, not remembering half of what happened during the first read, but being able to understand the interpersonal relationships and story better.
With the “Homo Faber” I’ve had that to an great extend and enjoyed it so much more this time around. Probably also due to being – a tad bit – maturer1.
Obviously in here I have to talk about what the story is about, so if you want to start reading the book with a clean slate then you better stop reading here and come back in a few days.
The story from the outside may seem a bit odd, but if you put some time into it you’ll see the brilliance.
summary
To put the story frankly:
Walter Faber (the protagonist) is a 50 year old engineer that tries to life his whole life rationally. The world to him seems describable in numbers and equations, he is a strong believer in the Laplace’s demon2. He has been in love around 30 with a woman he was expecting a child with, but left her with the agreement that the child will be aborted. The decades following that he is working as an engineer, living in his mathematical world and also having an affair in New York City on the side.
But on a ship to travel from NYC to Paris he gets to know a 20 year old girl that he falls in love with. The love is described very well but a few dozen pages later turns odder.
From the start of the book, it being a report, Walter Faber already speaks about what is to come then. It turns out on a nice hill by Rome that the girl he loves is his daughter, while talking about the woman’s mother. He doesn’t want that to be true and that way he calculates her age, when he nearly had a child and results in her being one year off, hoping that she would be the daughter of another man.
Nearly the whole book he is not sure of the matter, but as they are driving down to Athens, to her mother, he is bound to find out.
But then, just 70km before Athens, she gets bitten by a snake and falls on the back of her head. She gets into a hospital after some trouble, the mother joins in and the daughter gets treated well. The following day(s) Walter Faber and the mother or his ex-partner spent the time together a bit awkwardly. The day after the snake bite they go back to where the girl was bitten while she is still in the hospital to get the things they just let laying there while he was rushing her to get care.
They had a fine time together and get flowers then on the way to the hospital.
But arriving at the hospital they get told that the daughter has recently died. Not from the poisonous snake, that she got treated against, but from a skull fracture she got after falling on her head after the bite.
The days after Walter eventually has to go back to work, tries to live life “normally” again. But it doesn’t seem to work, after trying to go through video tapes to find a construction site he worked at he sees his dead daughter, sees her being in love with him. Sees her lovely features, her arms, lips, ears. But knows she’ll never come back. And that all those are gone forever now.
From that point onwards he doesn’t manage to life as an engineer anymore.
Spends some time in Havana and eventually quits his job.
The book ends with Faber getting a stomach cancer diagnosis which leaves him with a weeks up to two years more to life. The ending is open, but at the point where it cuts off he is in pain and slowly dying already.
what to think of it
I enjoy Frisch’s writing here a lot. He never makes it boring, and even though it’s an Ödipus like story we can appreciate it’s art.
I’m not sure if Frisch tried to dismantle the “engineering centric” world of the 50s, if he tried to say that the man of numbers is not living a life-worthy-life. But himself having been an architect a lot of his lifetime I can’t believe so.
To me it’s primarily a good love story, ignoring the circumstances that Faber did not know while he lived through it. Also ignoring the 30 year age gap.
After central Europe has been hostile for years during and after the second world war it will also have had an importance that this so influential book has played in many so different cultured places of the world.
- Caracas
- Guatemala
- Rome
- Paris
- New York City
- Athens
- Mexico
- Düsseldorf
- Havana
There’s a reason why students in Germany were forced to read this Swiss book in school for decades. But to be truthful I would probably not have enjoyed it as much, would I have read it in school.
At last I can warmly recommend this book to you, It’s worth giving a chance and it can very much change your view or your perception about certain things. That makes it worth reading for myself.