Goodreads | Man in the Holocene (Paperback) by Max Frisch

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I Love Lists: Barthelme's Syllabus	6	86	10/28/2008 11:13AM

Andrew rated it:

07/12/07

Old age is a motherfucker.

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Green rated it:

(review of isbn 1564784665)

10/09/08

Read in October, 2008

Reviewed by Nick Sarno

The best thing about reading manuscripts is that they come with no expectations. They arrive absolutely free of history. For as much as I may love Samuel Beckett, I’m constantly forced to wonder how much of this was set up for me in advance by the Beckett brand. I don’t know when I first read him, nor exactly what lead me to him, but I can imagine at least a few of the things I knew about him before I cracked open Molloy for the first time: he worked as Joyce’s as...more Reviewed by Nick Sarno

The best thing about reading manuscripts is that they come with no expectations. They arrive absolutely free of history. For as much as I may love Samuel Beckett, I’m constantly forced to wonder how much of this was set up for me in advance by the Beckett brand. I don’t know when I first read him, nor exactly what lead me to him, but I can imagine at least a few of the things I knew about him before I cracked open Molloy for the first time: he worked as Joyce’s assistant during the composition of Finnegans Wake; his works are more philosophy-driven than plot- or character-driven; they are rooted in Existentialism; they are humorous, dark, and so on. What I expected (and found) were high quality works of philosophical black comedy lacking characters and plot. I can’t help wondering what my reception of Waiting for Godot would have been had I never heard of its author, had I not been aware that it was written during the Second World War, etc. I could have left the theater thinking, now that was a great piece of slapstick. And I wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.
I get to be that person when I’m reading an unpublished manuscript for the first time, that kid I was over ten years ago, during that summer when Arthur Rimbaud was “that Rimbaud guy.” It’s exciting (I’ve been more excited to read recently than I had been for years), but it’s a little scary too. The stakes are higher. If I’m wrong about something, I’m really, really wrong. And if I get stuck in a conversation about a work I’m reading, I can’t fall back on decades (or centuries) of criticism to help me bullshit my way through. If I don’t know something, I truly don’t know it, and no amount of Googling is going to help me figure it out.
But it’s good, because it’s forced me to stay sharp. I’ve tried to carry this over to my general reading, too. And so, for the past few years, I’ve gone out of my way to find authors that I’ve never heard of before, scanning shelves for unfamiliar names, basing my purchases solely on what I see on the page. Off of the top of my head: Bove, Queneau, Simenon, Kita, Kawabata, Barbusse, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, etc. Granted, some (most) of these are big names, but either I had never heard of them before or, if I had, they hadn’t registered. In fact, I remember reading the last line of The Last Days and being pissed off that no one had alerted me to Raymond Queneau before. And if I get a little down after reading another article about Fernando Pessoa in the New York Times, it’s not because I want to keep him for myself. It’s only because I know that the expectations are now mounting, and fewer people are going to be able to read The Book of Disquiet with fresh eyes.
That said, I hope I’m not going to ruin Max Frisch for you.
Man in the Holocene was originally published in Switzerland in 1979, made it to the US in translation the next year, but had been out of print for nearly fifteen years until Dalkey Archive brought in back in 2007. Written some ten years before Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it shares so many similarities with that novel that it’s nearly impossible to imagine Markson writing it without Frisch in mind. Like Markson’s unnamed narrator, Frisch’s Geiser finds himself alone, at a metaphorical end-of-the-world, reading, brooding over loneliness and memory loss. The same questions keep cropping up: What good are all of these books if there is no one to read them? What good will they do me when I can no longer read? If I’ve forgotten what I’ve read, will it be as though I’ve never read at all? And when I write, to whom am I writing?
But where Markson’s narrator seems trapped in her own head (and the reader there with her—we’re never actually certain whether or not the events described have taken place), Geiser is stuck in the world as it is. The falling rains that threaten to wash his town away are all too real, as are the power outages and food shortages, and Frisch’s prose manages to capture the atmosphere of the rain without ever becoming purple:
"Last night there were stars to be seen, though not many, and even, for minutes on end, the moon between racing clouds, veils of whitish mist in the lower valley, the wet cliffs above glittering in places like aluminum foil, and the moon above the black woods looked more arid then ever—

Today it is gurgling again."
Like all good writers, Frisch teaches one how to read the text as one goes along. By the third page the commas, which could very easily could have been nothing more than surface flourishes, begin to function. They not only capture the rhythm of the weather, but represent Geiser’s thought process as well: halting, struggling to remain on track, threatening to lose the point entirely before, at the very end, turning back upon itself. Here’s another:
"When the sun is shining on the granite roofs, when the gutters are not overflowing, when the old walls are not wet, when there are no puddles, when it is not dripping and gurgling everywhere, when the sunflowers are not snapped in the middle, when the church tower rises into a blue sky, when the only splashing comes from the fountain, when one is not picking one’s way through rivulets, when the surrounding mountains are not gray, then it is a picturesque village."
The rain is described by its absence. The sun may be shining on the granite roofs, but the rain can be heard in the rhythm of the sentence, and rather than ordering the things as the eye would see them (from the ground up, for example: puddles, sunflowers, walls, gutters, roofs, etc.) they are ordered as Geiser’s increasingly scattered mind imagines them: sunny then overflowing, blue skies and downpours, positives and negatives.
To pass the time, Geiser observes. And he reads. Convinced that the rains will lead to a landslide burying all of man’s knowledge, he reads, transcribes, and excerpts selections from history books, from encyclopedia’s, from the bible. It is a way of saving such knowledge for posterity, but it is also more than that: Geiser is, in a way, attempting to save even God from Himself. For if the rains He creates destroys man and his works, what will be left of God?
Although Frisch is considered an experimental writer, many of the devices he employs are common enough (and were so thirty years ago) to no longer warrant the classification: fragmented text, lack of plot, “reproductions” of pictures and handwritten notes. Only the last of these demand to be commented upon. A small but significant portion of the text is taken up with such documents which, save in a few instances, do nothing for the work. An author must create the illusion that his or her words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., are inevitable, that they could have been written no other way, and this applies to collage techniques as well. When it works, as in recent Eco for example, the reader is left with the impression that the images and excerpts could not have been merely described or woven into the text: their placement was necessary. Frisch’s, by and large, are not. The reproduction of an excerpt from Genesis, cut from the Old Testament and taped to a wall, simply does not function. Any reader of Man in the Holocene will have the Flood already in mind and the choice to simply reproduce it rather than work with or against such expectations only comes off as gimmicky. And so it is with many of his textual reproductions. In a novel about time, the passing of eras and man’s place in them, lists consisting of little more than “Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, etc.” appear unnecessary at best, distracting at worst. Only near the very end of the novel, where the entry for “Apoplexy” from a medical dictionary is reproduced, does it achieve the desired effect: here we learn what has been plaguing Geiser all along. The fact that the character with whom we just spent the last hundred or so pages, a character who obviously thinks deeply about everything, finds himself unable to think about the one true thing affecting him and can do nothing more than attach this definition to a wall to remind himself of his condition, this gives the reader true insight into Geiser and changes our perception of the rest of the novel. If only the device were used to such great effect throughout.
But this is a small complaint. As a meditation on time, aging, memory and reading, Man in the Holocene is a powerful work. The metaphor Frisch has chosen to frame it: constant rains, floods, the melting of the polar icecaps, erosion, make it even more so today. I can, unfortunately, see a time when this small book about one old man’s loss can be read as a metaphor for us all.

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Nicholas rated it:

(review of isbn 1564784665)

10/02/08

Read in September, 2008

The best thing about reading manuscripts is that they come with no expectations. They arrive absolutely free of history. For as much as I may love Samuel Beckett, I’m constantly forced to wonder how much of this was set up for me in advance by the Beckett brand. I don’t know when I first read him, nor exactly what lead me to him, but I can imagine at least a few of the things I knew about him before I cracked open Molloy for the first time: he worked as Joyce’s assistant during the composi...more The best thing about reading manuscripts is that they come with no expectations. They arrive absolutely free of history. For as much as I may love Samuel Beckett, I’m constantly forced to wonder how much of this was set up for me in advance by the Beckett brand. I don’t know when I first read him, nor exactly what lead me to him, but I can imagine at least a few of the things I knew about him before I cracked open Molloy for the first time: he worked as Joyce’s assistant during the composition of Finnegans Wake; his works are more philosophy-driven than plot- or character-driven; they are rooted in Existentialism; they are humorous, dark, and so on. What I expected (and found) were high quality works of philosophical black comedy lacking characters and plot. I can’t help wondering what my reception of Waiting for Godot would have been had I never heard of its author, had I not been aware that it was written during the Second World War, etc. I could have left the theater thinking, now that was a great piece of slapstick. And I wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.
I get to be that person when I’m reading an unpublished manuscript for the first time, that kid I was over ten years ago, during that summer when Arthur Rimbaud was “that Rimbaud guy.” It’s exciting (I’ve been more excited to read recently than I had been for years), but it’s a little scary too. The stakes are higher. If I’m wrong about something, I’m really, really wrong. And if I get stuck in a conversation about a work I’m reading, I can’t fall back on decades (or centuries) of criticism to help me bullshit my way through. If I don’t know something, I truly don’t know it, and no amount of Googling is going to help me figure it out.
But it’s good, because it’s forced me to stay sharp. I’ve tried to carry this over to my general reading, too. And so, for the past few years, I’ve gone out of my way to find authors that I’ve never heard of before, scanning shelves for unfamiliar names, basing my purchases solely on what I see on the page. Off of the top of my head: Bove, Queneau, Simenon, Kita, Kawabata, Barbusse, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, etc. Granted, some (most) of these are big names, but either I had never heard of them before or, if I had, they hadn’t registered. In fact, I remember reading the last line of The Last Days and being pissed off that no one had alerted me to Raymond Queneau before. And if I get a little down after reading another article about Fernando Pessoa in the New York Times, it’s not because I want to keep him for myself. It’s only because I know that the expectations are now mounting, and fewer people are going to be able to read The Book of Disquiet with fresh eyes.
That said, I hope I’m not going to ruin Max Frisch for you.
Man in the Holocene was originally published in Switzerland in 1979, made it to the US in translation the next year, but had been out of print for nearly fifteen years until Dalkey Archive brought in back in 2007. Written some ten years before Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it shares so many similarities with that novel that it’s nearly impossible to imagine Markson writing it without Frisch in mind. Like Markson’s unnamed narrator, Frisch’s Geiser finds himself alone, at a metaphorical end-of-the-world, reading, brooding over loneliness and memory loss. The same questions keep cropping up: What good are all of these books if there is no one to read them? What good will they do me when I can no longer read? If I’ve forgotten what I’ve read, will it be as though I’ve never read at all? And when I write, to whom am I writing?
But where Markson’s narrator seems trapped in her own head (and the reader there with her—we’re never actually certain whether or not the events described have taken place), Geiser is stuck in the world as it is. The falling rains that threaten to wash his town away are all too real, as are the power outages and food shortages, and Frisch’s prose manages to capture the atmosphere of the rain without ever becoming purple:
"Last night there were stars to be seen, though not many, and even, for minutes on end, the moon between racing clouds, veils of whitish mist in the lower valley, the wet cliffs above glittering in places like aluminum foil, and the moon above the black woods looked more arid then ever—

Today it is gurgling again."
Like all good writers, Frisch teaches one how to read the text as one goes along. By the third page the commas, which could very easily could have been nothing more than surface flourishes, begin to function. They not only capture the rhythm of the weather, but represent Geiser’s thought process as well: halting, struggling to remain on track, threatening to lose the point entirely before, at the very end, turning back upon itself. Here’s another:
"When the sun is shining on the granite roofs, when the gutters are not overflowing, when the old walls are not wet, when there are no puddles, when it is not dripping and gurgling everywhere, when the sunflowers are not snapped in the middle, when the church tower rises into a blue sky, when the only splashing comes from the fountain, when one is not picking one’s way through rivulets, when the surrounding mountains are not gray, then it is a picturesque village."
The rain is described by its absence. The sun may be shining on the granite roofs, but the rain can be heard in the rhythm of the sentence, and rather than ordering the things as the eye would see them (from the ground up, for example: puddles, sunflowers, walls, gutters, roofs, etc.) they are ordered as Geiser’s increasingly scattered mind imagines them: sunny then overflowing, blue skies and downpours, positives and negatives.
To pass the time, Geiser observes. And he reads. Convinced that the rains will lead to a landslide burying all of man’s knowledge, he reads, transcribes, and excerpts selections from history books, from encyclopedia’s, from the bible. It is a way of saving such knowledge for posterity, but it is also more than that: Geiser is, in a way, attempting to save even God from Himself. For if the rains He creates destroys man and his works, what will be left of God?
Although Frisch is considered an experimental writer, many of the devices he employs are common enough (and were so thirty years ago) to no longer warrant the classification: fragmented text, lack of plot, “reproductions” of pictures and handwritten notes. Only the last of these demand to be commented upon. A small but significant portion of the text is taken up with such documents which, save in a few instances, do nothing for the work. An author must create the illusion that his or her words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., are inevitable, that they could have been written no other way, and this applies to collage techniques as well. When it works, as in recent Eco for example, the reader is left with the impression that the images and excerpts could not have been merely described or woven into the text: their placement was necessary. Frisch’s, by and large, are not. The reproduction of an excerpt from Genesis, cut from the Old Testament and taped to a wall, simply does not function. Any reader of Man in the Holocene will have the Flood already in mind and the choice to simply reproduce it rather than work with or against such expectations only comes off as gimmicky. And so it is with many of his textual reproductions. In a novel about time, the passing of eras and man’s place in them, lists consisting of little more than “Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, etc.” appear unnecessary at best, distracting at worst. Only near the very end of the novel, where the entry for “Apoplexy” from a medical dictionary is reproduced, does it achieve the desired effect: here we learn what has been plaguing Geiser all along. The fact that the character with whom we just spent the last hundred or so pages, a character who obviously thinks deeply about everything, finds himself unable to think about the one true thing affecting him and can do nothing more than attach this definition to a wall to remind himself of his condition, this gives the reader true insight into Geiser and changes our perception of the rest of the novel. If only the device were used to such great effect throughout.
But this is a small complaint. As a meditation on time, aging, memory and reading, Man in the Holocene is a powerful work. The metaphor Frisch has chosen to frame it: constant rains, floods, the melting of the polar icecaps, erosion, make it even more so today. I can, unfortunately, see a time when this small book about one old man’s loss can be read as a metaphor for us all.

...less

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Eugene rated it:

(review of isbn 1564784665)

05/26/08

Read in May, 2008

enjoyed it--and i bet it was great fresh--but now seems somehow dated, or superseded ...a faulty way to think about literature, like some progressive science, but some of that must also, it seems, be true... or maybe it's something like what's said of art forgeries, the tricks become more apparent with time. and what was less apparently missing in this one is something deeper, more nuanced, about the affliction of age. ...though you do feel the general sting pretty potently enuf.

was fasting ...more

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Astall rated it:

07/09/08

Read in July, 2008

The narrative reads in short fragments, interspersed with extra-textual tables, cut-outs from encyclopedias and local histories. Structurally, it is somewhat similar to flipping through a writer's notebook. It felt comfortable to me, in that regard.

I admired the overwhelming sense of claustrophobia Frisch constructed. There is very little physical detail, and what little there is has been filtered very carefully out from the depths of Geiser's (the protagonist's) mind.

The encyclopedia ...more

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John rated it:

(review of isbn 1564784665)

02/12/08

Read in February, 2008

old man living on mountain worries about whether a heavy rainstorm will cause a landslide. meanwhile, he occupies himself with articles from an encyclopedia set that sets into relief how little man knows in the present holocene geological period. "man remains an amateur." brief, but hefty, yet kind of like beckett-light.

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Carl rated it:

08/11/08

At 110 pages, including pictures, this book was a delightful break from the other assignments in my 20th century post-modern literature home schooling. The same goes for Calvino's 'Invisible Cities'. Keep those brilliant novels of less than 150 pages coming.

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Amy rated it:

06/12/08

Nicely short, a good reminder of mortality, and includes many clippings from the encyclopedia regarding Alpine rocks and brontosaurs, who had tiny tiny lemon-brains to run their 30-ton bodies.

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Aron rated it:

(review of isbn 1564784665)

09/18/07

Read in September, 2007

max frish = swiss architect/author

holocene = the geological epoch in which we currently living

how does one organize the world in a meaningful way?

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James rated it:

10/29/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2007

recommended to James by: Grad student from Germany

Max Frisch is a Swiss author. A very realistic account of aging. I am very much interested in reading more books by this author.

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