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by Max Frisch

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Can anybody please give a detailed summary of Homo faber by Max Frisch in English?

Wolfgang

This answer contains spoilersâ€� (view spoiler)[The story of a 50 year-old Swiss Engineer, Walter Faber, in the 1950's who meets and then has an affair with a 20 year-old woman during a trans-Atlantic ship voyage from the U.S. to Europe. Travelling on the Continent together Faber eventually discovers that the woman is his own daughter, whom he never suspected was alive. He had parted twenty years before from the young woman's mother who was half-Jewish and had to flee the Nazis during the war. Faber had assumed the child had been aborted or died. Oddly, Frisch decided to confide to the reader through the narrator (Faber, 10 years later) fairly early on in the book, the (not-so-surprising) fact of the incestuous relationship.

By far the best writing appears in the first part of the book when Faber describes his travels to Mexico, Guatamala, and later to Cuba. Frisch's considerable narrative skills really are on display in these chapters. The second part of the book deals with the couple's travels in Paris, Rome, and finally, (tragically) in Athens, where the young woman's mother (Faber's former lover) had been living and working.

The novel deteriorates badly in the last chapters. The style suddenly changes to a sort of incoherent rambling consisting of disconnected sentence fragments and (gratuitously) viciously anti-American rants.

Many reviews of the novel, including the publisher's testimonial blurb on the back of the book, describe the novel as a sort of existentialist expose of the real plight of the Western, post-war industrialist/technologist in an irrational and absurd world. Faber is portrayed as the personification of the scientific, logical and rational man. But judging from his actions, he is anything but "rational". (At one point, by way of inserting a gratuitous allusion to Oedipus, Faber contemplates gouging his eyes out with a fork. So much for "rational man".)

I read the book first in the original German and then the (for the most part) competent English translation by Michael Bullock.
(hide spoiler)]

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Who knows the English translation for this quote? "Das Wahrscheinliche (...) und das Unwahrscheinliche (...) unterscheiden sich nicht dem Wesen nach, sondern nur HÃ¤ufigkeit nach, wobei das HÃ¤ufigere von vornherein als glaubwÃ¼rdiger erscheint. Es ist aber , wenn einmal das Unwahrscheinliche eintritt, nichts HÃ¶heres dabei, keinerlei Wunder oder Derartiges, wie es der Laie so gerne haben mÃ¶chte. (...)"

Wolfgang A colloquial translation:
"The difference betweeen a probable and an improbable event does not lie in their essential natures, but rather only in the fâ€¦m´Ç°ù±ðA colloquial translation:
"The difference betweeen a probable and an improbable event does not lie in their essential natures, but rather only in the frequency with which they occur. The more frequent event appears at the outset to be more believable. But when an improbable event does occur there is nothing really special or miraculous about it, as many (non-professional) peope seem to think."(less)

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