Man in the Holocene

This novella is a neglected masterpiece of 20th century literature. As a study of modern anxiety & alienation, it belongs on a shelf with Sartre's "Nausea" and Camus' "The Stranger." The form is completely original: the narrative of a 73 year-old man's mental and physical collapse is told in fragments of memory and thought, some only a few words long. Taken together, these fragments, completely controlled and deadpan, approach the beauty of prose poetry. One or two of the fragments have the harrowing power of Kafka's aphorisms--than which there is no higher praise. Shame on HBJ for letting this jewel of modern European literature go out of print. And kudos to Dalkey Archive Press for rescuing it.

My experience is much like that of the other reviewers here. I first read this tale years ago, and have found myself haunted by its compelling beauty and strangeness ever since. It's a rich, deep work, one worth revisting often.

Herr Geiser, a widowed pensioner living alone in the Ticino valley, is trapped in his house through days and nights of torrential rains and thunderstorms. Rumors of landslides blocking the only access to the valley have reached him, and he has observed cracks and cave-ins around his house. While fear and solitude are closing in on him, he tries hard to stay in control, to hold on to rationality. Preparing for a siege, he starts by taking stock of provisions, but ends by assessing his mental equipment: his memory fails him repeatedly, and he catches himself doing - or thinking of doing - irrational things. He seeks reassurance by testing his cognitive functions; he still knows some basic geometry, some history, some geology - things an educated man should know. Eager to nail down the fragments of his mental armature, he copies entries from the encyclopedia and tacks the paper slips to the wall. When this proves too burdensome, he simply cuts out whole paragraphs and tapes them up in his "gallery". By analysis and classification, by naming and describing things and fitting them into systems, he tries to impose order on chaos. But disorder keeps intruding: cobwebs irritate him, and he nearly wrecks the staircase trying to get rid of them. The appearance of a spotted salamander in the bathroom upsets him, triggering visions of dinosaurs and retrogressive metamorphosis. Reading passages of the Bible provides no comfort: Geiser does not believe in the Flood. He is a skeptic, a child of the enlightened 20th century. The anguish and frustration he feels is palpable, although the language is unemotional, almost impersonal. Geological processes serve as metaphors for crumbling and slipping mental functions: erosion, landslide, flooding, blockage, bypass, rockfalls, heaps of debris. There is a touch of gallows humor in Geiser's futile attempts to put his house in order and to conceal or rationalize his mishaps. His long-term memory is admirably intact; he remembers every detail of a mountain climb 50 years ago, of a sandstorm near Baghdad, of a visit to the primordial landscape of Iceland. Finally, he makes a gallant and desperate attempt to escape over a steep mountain pass to Italy. But when he is in sight of his goal, after a harrowing climb through fog and rain, he decides to return to his house in the valley. The knowledge that " he could have done it" gives him great satisfaction. He suffers a stroke and is found by his daughter, who opens a window and lets in a gust of air, scattering the paper slips.(This image is eerily reminiscent of the famous scene in the Aeneid, where a draft enters the sibyl's cave, blowing all the leaves about and making nonsense of her prophecies and predictions). Seeing his precious "gallery" in a confused and useless heap on the floor, Geiser wonders if any of this stuff was worth knowing: "Nature needs no names". Naming things is not synonymous with understanding them or with having dominion over them. Geiser is content t

I read this book first as a teen-ager when it appeared in The New Yorker. I kept intending to put it down, it was so strange (especially for a teen-ager), but it was so compelling that I read every word. It has stuck with me ever since -- not as a conscious memory but more as a spiritual one (ick -- sorry -- I usually hate stuff like that, but there it is). What I mean is that it changed my view of the world, making me realize the individual's small place in it, which can be a very comforting realization anytime things go all topsy turvy in your life. Now I am re-reading it at 46 and enjoying it even more; in fact, I am going to give it to my father who is terminally ill. Frisch's book Homo Faber is much different -- a tragic fable with lots or mythic references -- but also excellent. What a writer he was!

My life was greatly enriched by reading the superb English translation of Frisch's "Man in the Holocene". Frisch piles intimate, mundane details into a metaphor for the human condition and allows the reader to draw the larger inferences. An isolated alpine cottage becomes all the world we need. The need to understand our world is balanced by the depressing realization that we know less every day as we age. As Herr's options close in, we realize what Frisch has brought us to..Man in the Holocene. Fifteen years after reading this book, it is still the first I recommend to a new acquaintance. You'll think of it every time you mislay your car keys. Absolutely important and finely crafted. A must read.