MAN IN THE HOLOCENE

by Max Frisch ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 1980

A widowered pensioner in his 70s, Geiser, lives alone in the small Swiss-valley village of Ticino, near the Italian border. A summer rain commences one day and does not stop. The tomatoes in the garden are ruined. The roads are blocked by mudslides. Food from village shops is hoarded. In other words, an emergency--but for some reason Geiser accelerates it into a private catastrophe, a crisis not only of nature but his own mortality. He begins to tape up encyclopedia articles--about geology, dinosaurs, the Pythagorean theorem--on all the walls of his house. He disCovers a newt in his bathroom, a harbinger of some loathsome animal development (retrogression?). And, likewise with no rational reason, he sets out one afternoon in the rain to hike into the next valley and back (""there is always ground, even at night""). Upon his return, he suffers a small stroke, Iris grown daughter comes to help him, and the book ends with Geiser not quite remembering why he put those pages on the walls; his only vivid memory is of a climb up the Matterhorn, years ago, with his now-dead brother. A simple book? Yes, but deceptively so, because, strained through the story's wide tines is Frisch's hallmark concern: the eerie process by which one man moves from memory into knowledge and out again. In fact, Frisch is so major an artist that, from a spell of bad weather and what it does to Geiser, he has been able to crystallize quite convincingly the end or beginning of consciousness--you're never sure which. True, in the hands of a lesser writer, the images here--the newt, the encyclopedia pages, the rain, the Matterhorn climb--would all be clumsily symbolic. But Frisch makes them seem like directional arrows; and all the while he maintains the levelest of tones, achieves the subtlest accumulations. A magnificently translated, consistently tantalizing book--much more than itself, stunningly controlled.

Pub Date: June 4, 1980

ISBN: 1564784665

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION