Good satisfying read. Made me want to see the film and read more of Frisch's books.
Walter Faber is accosted by "fatigue phenomena" when he becomes unwilling to re-board his business flight to Mexico which crashes in the desert. From this point his life is altered, and by way of a series of coincidences, he must reassess his mechanistic apprehension of human existence. This process has elements of Greek tragedy; appropriately the story ends in Athens.

This one was a relatively quick read, and one that I very much enjoyed. Many other reviews exist of this book (even on LT) so I’ll just focus on the things I particularly liked.

Much of the book reads like an account of care-free, leisurely tourism through Mexico and Europe. The main character has trouble engaging with art, emotions and non-calculatable motivations that drive other people. Usually, these characters get stereotyped into unrelatability, but here I thought the main character’s confrontation with other humans, art and sunrises through mid-life crisis romance felt fairly genuine and sometimes even endearing (YMMV though).

Another thing I liked very much is the way that the layering of focalizers added to the characterization. Normally, the accumulation of occasional meta-comments and the choice of what the narrator focuses on or introduces would read like a clumsy omniscient narrator failing to conceal their set-up of the big twist, a joke with the punch-line set up telegraphed way too obviously. But since the book is framed as the main character retelling their experiences after the fact, the clumsiness comes across as self-delusion, a blindness to certain areas of life that are entirely in line with the kind of person the main character is.

I’m glad I read this. It’s a pity I didn’t get to it sooner. ( )

Ich bin mir nicht sicher, was ich mit diesem Buch anfangen soll. Seit längerem ist es das erste, das mich fesseln konnte. Der Stil, die Handlung, ja, sogar die Personen wirken ausreichend echt. Max Frisch scheint mir durch die Zeilen hindurch ein wahres Ekel gewesen zu sein, aber dieses Buch, ich liebe es ein bisschen. (Vielleicht gerade für zeitweilige Offensichtlichkeiten.)
Angefangen hab ich damit ja nur, weil ich eigentlich "Maya oder das Wunder des Lebens" wieder einmal lesen wollte, was mich an das Kartengeheimnis erinnerte, was mich an den Geschichtenverkäufer erinnerte, was mich an diese Wissenslücker erinnerte. ( )

I wanted to like this book. The writing was very readable, I didn't realize there were no chapters until I was halfway into the book. There were a couple things that I had a hard time with, like the relationship with Sabeth, and his feelings on abortion. ( )

Plot:
Walter Faber is an engineer working for UNESCO and is en route to Latin America for a work project. When his plane has to do an emergency landing in the desert and he meets the brother of an old friend there, it is only the first of a series of coincidences that start to shake Walter’s belief in a rational, technocratic world and ultimately lead him to a young woman not even half his age, Sabeth, with whom he falls in love. But doom is not far away.

Despite many good qualities, Homo Faber feels longer than it is and I never really connected with Walter or any of the other characters in it.

Read more on my blog: http://kalafudra.com/2015/08/24/homo-faber-max-frisch/ ( )