Group Read, January 2016: I'm Not Stiller.

Happy New Year, and here's hoping for another stimulating year of Group Reads. We're kicking off the year with Max Frischs I'm Not Stiller. Please put any comments you have on this thread.

Found my copy and read the first couple of pages. Really glad that I'm finally getting to it. Very interesting beginning, I'm hopeing for a quiet week to read some more.

This is a wacky and fascinating book. I normally hate reviewers who say things like this, but this book really is like what would happen if Thomas Bernhard wrote a Kafka plot -- and since I like both of those authors, I'm liking this. It poses an interesting challenge about questions of identity -- what it consists of, how you acquire one, how you can lose it, how it relates to your actual biography. The book doesn't exactly have a plot at this point (100 pages in) yet I'm extremely curious to see how it turns out.

Am I the only person reading this? It's good, and interesting, and I'd love to hear somebody else's opinion on it as it unfolds. It's not quite what I expected at the beginning. I still don't understand why he's in prison. And the dentist scene made me wonder about his identity again.

I just started last night. I'm assuming the reason everyone is looking for Stiller will be revealed later on.

I'm only about 40 pages in but enjoying the book so far.

I've also just started. Hopeful that the mystery will remain intriguing.

>4 annamorphic: I was kept up by other challenges in the 75 group and the neverending Gravity's Rainbow (which I finally finished this weekend), but I'm totally determined to read this one this month. So far I only made it to page 30, but now I've taken it to the office with me for lunch break reading.

When somebody else finishes this one I'd love to know -- why do you think the last chapter was there? It seemed to me to weaken the book so much, to make it ordinary almost, like a story about people when before it had been an anti-story. Perhaps that was the point, but that section was so banal in its tragedy that I really did not like it.

I'm now 160 pages in. The Stiller that "White" is writing about is so unlikeable that it seems they must be two people or White would have taken a more empathetic view of his actions. On the other hand Whites story seems unbelievable so I remain intrigued.

Spoilers here, so don't read on if you haven't finished the book yet.

annamorphic -- I definitely think the book could have stood alone without that final chapter. However, I didn't mind it either... not so much because of the inevitable tragedy but because I thought that chapter did a good job of driving home Stiller's motivation for wanting to be someone else. (Not to mention his reason for coming back.)

Finished this today. I thought much of it was well written and as it progressed there were interesting thoughts on how we see ourselves and how we'd like others to see us. I must confess though that I didn't really get in to a lot of it even if it was thought provoking.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I think I understood the basic premise (reinventing himself so he could start afresh) but, while I enjoyed some of the back stories, his completely detached denials still didn't make a whole lot of logical sense to me. That might be why I didn't mind the last chapter as it clarified who the real Stiller was.

I'm over half point now and continue reading very slowly because the book makes me think so much. Actually, it also tells me a lot about myself and the Stiller/Julika relationship was very painful to read. I needed a bit to get into the writing - don't know about the translation, but the original is an old-fashioned German I don't like very much and that reads older than Thomas Mann. But now I got used to it and even enjoy the flow of the narrative.

This book wanted to be read in long concentrated sittings, so I had to wait for another weekend to finish it. How intelligent was it to give the protagonist a real outer prison that couldn't touch him because his own inner prison was so much worse?
For me, this was a great, great book in the end. But I don't know a single person in RL to whom I'd recommend it.

BIG SPOILERS: and I apologize for letting personal experiences influence me here.

I agree it could have stood without the final chapter, but I'm glad it didn't. It lost magic and gained honesty, just like real life. It's an interesting approach to let the reader jump from one head into a different one so abruptly and that the first long part is told by the narcissist with his fake elevation of self and the second part by someone "normal" and rational. I wondered what the prosecutor's account of those weeks in prison would have looked like and if Stiller's own notes on the time after wouldn't have been in accordance with his prison notebooks.

One big problem of narcissists is that they often hope to find healing in another person, they can't be on their own for long. Bad cases like Stiller suffer terribly under their inability to behave "normally" (as they think others expect them to behave), there's so incredibly much self-hatred and they have to torture their nearest and dearest (usually the partner) into reactions that confirm their negative self-image. I know from personal experience that at some point it is completely hopeless to reach someone like Stiller - his reality isn't yours. You can't get any more "normal" reactions because whatever you say is an offence for them, a provocation, a test they can't pass.

So Stiller ran away from everything that he thought was Stiller for everyone else - a typical reaction, though usually just applied to one area of life (new job, new partner, if possible total denial of what has happened in that area, no confrontation with the real deeper issues). But Stiller didn't get rid of the idea of the "healing" woman as his anchor and of course it must be the one who made him feel worst. Typical as well, I can tell you. The rage attack in the studio when he feels stuck in a corner? Totally typical, and yes, scary.

If the book had ended where the notes end, the mentally stable reader might get the illusion that Stiller's theory of being healed by love works. He would have had us fooled as he fooled himself.

It needs the second part and the eyes of a rational narrator to see that it doesn't - at least not if the partner isn't ready to go along. Julika was totally stuck, that was disappointing to see. She's very well written, but I would have liked to see her at least try.

>13 Deern: Wow, great review that makes me reevaluate what I thought of this book. I think that you are absolutely right about the function of that last chapter, and your analysis of Stiller himself is also very helpful.