HOMO FABER

Homo Faber, a Swiss bachelor nearing fifty, cool, analytical, a man of science, barks on a business journey. But through a freak encounter and a plane accident in the xican desert, he comes upon Joachim, the husband of Hanna, his childhood sweetheart. achim, hideously dead in the desert, is the victim of despair, a suicide. Shortly afterrd, on the way to Europe, Homo falls in love with Sabeth, a twenty-one year old girl. An accident on the coast of Greece in which Sabeth is bitten by an adder brings the couple Athens and Sabeth's mother, who, incidentally, is Hanna. Believing that the girl will rvive, Hanna informs Homo that he is her father; but Sabeth does not survive. She dies to the result of a fracture incurred when, in panic at having been bitten she recoils, from mo's outstretched hand and falls backward over a ledge. Torn between guilt and love for nna, Homo decides to marry her, but there, amidst the ruins of Hanna's life, his own, and child's, he, too, is victim of his own mortality, and prepares to die, convinced that ving existed, he is eternal. Reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger, this is a novel of spense and depth, but for those who have recognized the author's I'm Not Stiller as an istentialist work of unusual merit, the contrived situation and mechanical resolutions of plot will be somewhat anti-climactic.