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david's Reviews > Homo Faber
Homo Faber
by
by
‘Homo Faber� is the concept of humans being able to control their fate and the environment through tools.
Idealistic but it becomes the fodder for Mr. Frisch’s last published book.
It took a few pages to catch this writer’s rhythm but, soon thereafter, it was an easy lope to the end.
This grateful reader was awed by the sublime dexterity the author employed to integrate so many themes concomitantly. Not in the patronymic way of the old Russians where we are always trying to remember the eighteen different names by which each character may be referred.
But in a complex labyrinth that allows different perceptions to flourish. A difficult feat, indeed. And while he is toying around with us, he makes us laugh. Consistently and throughout.
(Many times, it reminded me of Henderson the Rain King)
Walter Faber is a regular guy who works as a technologist for an American corporation. He is the protagonist, and we can witness through his eyes, what this European, specifically a Swiss, squeezes out of his life on this earth, directly after World War Two.
Death plays a big part in living, as Frisch is aware, and he uses it as a mechanism for human interaction and man-made peccadillos, and how we futilely plan or attempt to manipulate the present and/or the denouement.
I am not trying to be opaque but there is so much to enjoy here, and I do not want to reveal it all. (Oh, and I am lazy)
It is a strong piece of work, to be enjoyed by both girls and boys alike.
Idealistic but it becomes the fodder for Mr. Frisch’s last published book.
It took a few pages to catch this writer’s rhythm but, soon thereafter, it was an easy lope to the end.
This grateful reader was awed by the sublime dexterity the author employed to integrate so many themes concomitantly. Not in the patronymic way of the old Russians where we are always trying to remember the eighteen different names by which each character may be referred.
But in a complex labyrinth that allows different perceptions to flourish. A difficult feat, indeed. And while he is toying around with us, he makes us laugh. Consistently and throughout.
(Many times, it reminded me of Henderson the Rain King)
Walter Faber is a regular guy who works as a technologist for an American corporation. He is the protagonist, and we can witness through his eyes, what this European, specifically a Swiss, squeezes out of his life on this earth, directly after World War Two.
Death plays a big part in living, as Frisch is aware, and he uses it as a mechanism for human interaction and man-made peccadillos, and how we futilely plan or attempt to manipulate the present and/or the denouement.
I am not trying to be opaque but there is so much to enjoy here, and I do not want to reveal it all. (Oh, and I am lazy)
It is a strong piece of work, to be enjoyed by both girls and boys alike.
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Quotes david Liked
“What I heard was the usual story: marriage, a child (which I didn’t quite catch, obviously, otherwise I shouldn’t have asked again later on), then the war, a prison camp, return to Düsseldorf and so on; it shook me to think how time passes, how we grow older.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Not being shaved gives me the feeling I’m some sort of plant and I keep involuntarily feeling my chin.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Ivy was a model, she chose her clothes to match the color of the car, I think, and the color of the car to match her lipstick or the other way around, I’m not sure which it was.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“the Indians were far too gentle, too peaceable, positively childlike. They squatted for whole evenings in their white straw hats on the earth, motionless as toadstools, content without light, silent. The sun and moon were enough light for them, an effeminate race, eerie but innocuous.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“At times he got on my nerves, like all artists who think themselves loftier or more profound beings simply because they don’t know what electricity is.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“A race like these Mayas, who hadn’t discovered the wheel and built pyramids and temples in the jungle, where everything becomes smothered in moss and crumbles with damp—what for?”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“When I woke Herbert, he sprang to his feet. What was the matter? When he saw that nothing was the matter, he started snoring again—to avoid being bored.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Hanna had Communist leanings, which I couldn’t bear, and on the other a tendency to mysticism, or to put it less kindly, hysteria”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I believe Ivy wanted me to hate myself and seduced me merely to make me hate myself, and that was her joy, to humiliate me, the only joy I could give her.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“We talked about constellations—the usual thing, when two people haven’t yet discovered which one knows less about the stars than the other; the rest is romantic fantasy, which I can’t bear.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Caresses in the evening, yes, but I can’t stand caresses in the morning, and frankly more than three or four days with one woman has always been for me the beginning of dissimulation, no man can stand feelings in the morning. I’d rather wash dishes! Sabeth laughed.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“a woman with time on her hands in the morning, a woman who wanders about before she is dressed, for example, rearranging flowers in a vase and talking about love and marriage, is something no man can stand, I believe, unless he dissembles.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“The very sight of a double room, unless it’s in a hotel I can leave again soon, a double room as a permanent arrangement, sets me thinking about the Foreign Legion”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I can’t have feelings all the time. Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don’t want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn’t always fun, you can’t always be in form.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I stand still so as not to hear steps in my apartment, steps that are after all only my own. The whole thing isn’t tragic, merely tiresome. You can’t wish yourself good night . . . Is that a reason for marrying?”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I had said what I never meant to say, but what has been said cannot be unsaid, I enjoyed our silence, I was completely sober again, but all the same I had no idea what I was thinking, probably nothing.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“War against puerperal fever. Caesarean operations. Incubators for premature births. We take life more seriously than in earlier times.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“What’s the difference between contraception and abortion? Both are expressions of the human will not to have children.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“How many children are really wanted? The fact that the woman would rather have it once it’s there is a different matter, an automatic reaction of the instincts, she forgets she tried to avoid it and added to this is the feeling of power over the man, motherhood as an economic weapon in the hands of the woman.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“There is no physical injury, unless the abortion is carried out by a quack; if there is any psychological injury it is only because the person in question is dominated by moral or religious ideas.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“To be consistent, those who argue that abortion is “unnaturalâ€� would have to say: no penicillin, no lightning rods, no eyeglasses, no DDT, no radar and so on.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Boys!â€� she said. “You can’t imagine what they’re like—they think you’re their mother, and that’s frightful!”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“In Florence I rebelled and told her that frankly I thought her Fra Angelico rather mawkish. Then I corrected myself and said “naive.â€� She didn’t deny it, on the contrary, she was delighted; it couldn’t be naïve enough for her. What I enjoyed was campari!”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I really began to feel that the young were beyond me. I often appeared to myself a deceiver. Why? I didn’t want to undermine her belief that Tivoli surpassed anything I had ever seen anywhere and that an afternoon in Tivoli, for example, was happiness squared; but I just couldn’t feel that way about it.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“on the one hand she had boundless trust in me, merely because I was thirty years older, a childish trust, and on the other hand no respect at all. I was vexed to find I expected respect.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“In general, only the future counted for her, and to a slight extent the present; but she had no interest at all in past experiences, like all young people.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I took pleasure in every moment that was in any real sense pleasurable. I didn’t turn somersaults, I didn’t sing, but there were certain things that I, too, enjoyed.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“How many of the people I meet are interested in whether I’m enjoying myself, in my feelings at all?”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Our journey wasn’t easy, though often curious: I bored her with my experience of life, she made me old by waiting from morning to evening, wherever we were, for my enthusiasm . . .”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I confessed I knew nothing about art—she based her view on a saying of her mother’s that anyone can respond to a work of art except the cultured philistine. “That’s very kind of your mother!â€� I said.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I can’t bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I waited, my hand around the stem, to clink glasses; I wasn’t in the least interested in Herr Piper, a man who lived in East Germany out of conviction”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“I ordered another half-bottle of Orvieto Abbocato, and then we talked about all sorts of things, about artichokes, Catholicism, cassata, the Sleeping Erinys, travel, the poverty of our time, and the best way to the Via Appia”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“She was seriously disappointed, a child I was treating like a woman, or a woman I was treating like a child, I didn’t know myself which it was.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“They were obviously Americans, I could hear their voices as the party wandered around our tomb; to judge by the voices, they might have been stenographers from Cleveland. “Oh, isn’t it lovely?â€� “Oh, is this the Campagna?â€� “Oh, how lovely it is here!”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“The ladiesâ€� mauve-dyed hair interspersed with the bald patches of the gentlemen, who had taken off their panama hats—they must have broken out of an old-age home, I thought, but I didn’t say it.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Do you know,â€� she said, “that was the Ludovisi Altar we liked so much this morning. It’s madly famous!â€� I let her give me a lecture.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“Hanna had no use for statistics, I soon realized that. She let me deliver a whole lecture—in the bathroom—about statistics, and at the end all she said was: “Your bath is getting cold.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“My work?â€� she said. “You can see for yourself, patching up fragments. That is supposed to have been a vase. From Crete. I stick the past together.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
“She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension.”
― Homo Faber
― Homo Faber
Reading Progress
June, 2018
–
Started Reading
June 15, 2018
– Shelved
June 16, 2018
–
10.0%
June 16, 2018
–
20.0%
June 16, 2018
–
25.0%
June 17, 2018
–
30.0%
June 17, 2018
–
45.0%
June 17, 2018
–
51.0%
June 17, 2018
–
59.0%
June 18, 2018
–
70.0%
June 18, 2018
–
84.0%
June 18, 2018
–
100.0%
June 19, 2018
–
Finished Reading
March 9, 2024
– Shelved as:
ontology
June 22, 2024
– Shelved as:
french-fries
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Abel
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Jun 19, 2018 12:42PM
Nicely done, david. Man in the Holocene is one of my alltime favorites and now I must read this.
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You may like it, Abel. It seems like your style also.
Very tempting, david - If I hadn't already listed this, your peccadillos-paragraph would have made me do so.
Ilse. I thought about you, at times, as I was reading it. You may like it.
Since the moment I have read his I'm not Stiller I have been hoping to read this one too, david - It is one of the favourites of our dear Jean-Paul and now I see it made quite an impression on you as well...
Thank you Ilse for informing me that Jp liked this also. He had very good taste, I think. I believe, Ilse, this one will touch you.
Thank you, young man.
david wrote: "Thank you, young man."XD! XD!
A wonderful review, David, of a wonderful book. I read it ages ago. Did you ever read plays by Max Frisch? Very much recommended too!
