Group Read, May 2020: Homo Faber
Charlas1001 Books to read before you die
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1puckers
Our May group read is Homo Faber by Max Frisch. Please join in the read and put any comments you have on this thread.
2Majel-Susan
I was so excited for this one that I started yesterday! I'm about halfway through so far.
4Majel-Susan
I've finished!
Walter was hardly at all an endearing narrator, but he was very human and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. The prose was lovely, and I could see and hear and feel Sabeth as she came out of the pages, big as life. And for something whose subject matter was incest, it wasn't, for me at least, written in a sensational or scandalising manner. Walter described her fully, and I understood how he fell in love with her, and he loved her not so much in a carnal sense as for the beauty of her joy and youth, which enabled him to continue to love her as "our child" once the truth was revealed to him.
It was so beautiful and visual, especially Sabeth and Walter walking along at night in Corinth and their Twenty-One Point game and how she sang to him in the morning; and then in Dusseldorf, when Walter sees Sabeth on the projection and he stands up, unable to stop looking at the pictures.
I was also particularly impressed by Hanna's point about the irrelevance of statistics to life; after all, as she points out in the case of snake bite fatalities, she has only one child. Everything colludes to undermine Walter's fixed understanding of life, and by the end, he also realises just how irrelevant probability is on a personal plane of life, because all of the improbable has already happened to him. And in "living without death," Walter realises almost too late how narrowly he has lived his life; it took Sabeth to bring him out of his prosaic view of living into the world of colours and similes, after which it is impossible for him to return to his former way of life, as was seen in his return to New York, his job, Guatemala, and his last flight.
Walter was hardly at all an endearing narrator, but he was very human and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. The prose was lovely, and I could see and hear and feel Sabeth as she came out of the pages, big as life. And for something whose subject matter was incest, it wasn't, for me at least, written in a sensational or scandalising manner. Walter described her fully, and I understood how he fell in love with her, and he loved her not so much in a carnal sense as for the beauty of her joy and youth, which enabled him to continue to love her as "our child" once the truth was revealed to him.
It was so beautiful and visual, especially Sabeth and Walter walking along at night in Corinth and their Twenty-One Point game and how she sang to him in the morning; and then in Dusseldorf, when Walter sees Sabeth on the projection and he stands up, unable to stop looking at the pictures.
I was also particularly impressed by Hanna's point about the irrelevance of statistics to life; after all, as she points out in the case of snake bite fatalities, she has only one child. Everything colludes to undermine Walter's fixed understanding of life, and by the end, he also realises just how irrelevant probability is on a personal plane of life, because all of the improbable has already happened to him. And in "living without death," Walter realises almost too late how narrowly he has lived his life; it took Sabeth to bring him out of his prosaic view of living into the world of colours and similes, after which it is impossible for him to return to his former way of life, as was seen in his return to New York, his job, Guatemala, and his last flight.
