I'm Not Stiller - May BOTM

[Diane]

Review thread. https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Diane]

I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch

1. The main reason this book is so popular is not the plot, but the Big Ideas that are explored. Discuss some of these ideas.

2. Another major theme is marriage and relationships, particularly between men and women. Your thoughts?

3. Most of the book is written in the first person, in the form of a journal or personal transcript that Stiller keeps during his imprisonment. Many have called the author’s prose brilliant, what did you think?

4. Symbolism. The characters' names all have meanings. Stiller, for example, means 'the quiet one’. Discuss and/or name any symbolism you found.

5. There are also copious subtle nods to various authors and philosophers, can you name a few?

6. Some have compared this book to Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', and in fact many reviews also compare this book to works by Kafka and Camus. If you have read them what do you think?

[[deleted user]]

1. The main idea is that of identity if no-one believes you how can you prove who you are. In today's world this is even more relevant as your identity can be stolen in a way you might never even know in the world of online and social media anyone can be anyone they want.

2. Didn't really like this aspect as all the couples seemed mismatched and no-one really seemed to care for anyone else. I guess the idea was that marriage is not exclusive and that no-one was faithful maybe.

3. I enjoy the sections where "not Stiller" is denying being Stiller and the diary entries where it seems it really is mistaken identity and then it lost its way for me when he became oh well why upset them by telling them I'm not Stiller and failing to follow up on items that could help prove he wasn't.

4. Missed that totally

5. Thomas Mann

6. I can see the comparison to Kafka the idea of getting nowhere of being stuck out of place.

[Kristel]

1. The main reason this book is so popular is not the plot, but the Big Ideas that are explored. Discuss some of these ideas. Identity, are we who we say we are or are we who others say we are? Are we free to invent ourselves but not free from our yesterdays. Do the books that we read make us different people? How does technology affect our beings. Other big ideas is marriage relationships.

2. Another major theme is marriage and relationships, particularly between men and women. Your thoughts? I think he did a good job but a lot of repetition and redundancy.

3. Most of the book is written in the first person, in the form of a journal or personal transcript that Stiller keeps during his imprisonment. Many have called the author’s prose brilliant, what did you think? I suspect it was great, maybe brilliant, but it wasn't engaging in my opinion, and frankly I was quite worn out from reading Bernhard to appreciate Frisch

4. Symbolism. The characters' names all have meanings. Stiller, for example, means 'the quiet one’. Discuss and/or name any symbolism you found. I can't say that I noticed any

5. There are also copious subtle nods to various authors and philosophers, can you name a few? Yes there was; Hemingway (Spain), Greene (Mexico), Thomas Mann (tuberculosis). There was a lot of authors and books alluded too. I can't recall all of them but Tolstoy was one, especially Anna Karenina.

6. Some have compared this book to Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', and in fact many reviews also compare this book to works by Kafka and Camus. If you have read them what do you think? It was Kafkaesque in that it explored the loneliness of the human condition. Camus is easier to read in my opinion and has more story in the telling.

[Pamela]

1. The main reason this book is so popular is not the plot, but the Big Ideas that are explored. Discuss some of these ideas.
Not sure I completely agree with this, as I think the plot (especially early on) was more compelling than the big ideas, but… Identity is the key theme - within that, what makes us who we are? How do relationships affect our own identity? Is it possible to reinvent ourselves or are there external impacts which prevent this?

2. Another major theme is marriage and relationships, particularly between men and women. Your thoughts?
I didn’t enjoy this aspect as it was repetitive, and the characters’ motivations and feelings were so obscured that I didn’t care about any of them. I was initially interested in the different perspectives of Sybille and Rolf, but it dragged on too long.

3. Most of the book is written in the first person, in the form of a journal or personal transcript that Stiller keeps during his imprisonment. Many have called the author’s prose brilliant, what did you think?
It was clever and I liked the way he created the stories about his life as ‘not Stiller’. I feel it was brilliant at times but not maintained evenly at that level throughout the book.

4. Symbolism. The characters' names all have meanings. Stiller, for example, means 'the quiet one’. Discuss and/or name any symbolism you found.
I didn’t notice this, I don’t speak German so that probably didn’t help.

5. There are also copious subtle nods to various authors and philosophers, can you name a few?
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as philosophers got several mentions. Thomas Mann - Julika’s illness is reminiscent of The Magic Mountain. The bullfighting scene is Hemingway. Anna Karenina and Effi Briest are mentioned in reference to love and marriage.

6. Some have compared this book to Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', and in fact many reviews also compare this book to works by Kafka and Camus. If you have read them what do you think?
The bizarre situation is like Kafka but Stiller has chosen to deny who he is and therefore caused his situation while the characters in Kafka are generally ordinary people struggling against an oppressive force which they can’t control. Camus also tackles similar existential issues but tends to focus more on the plot to illustrate them.

[Pip]

1. The Big Ideas: The biggest one is identity. Are we who we say we are or can we not escape the identity that others foist upon us? Frisch seems to be saying the latter.
2. Marriage, its challenges more than its joys, is a major theme. Both the marriage of Stiller and Frau Julika and that of the Public Prosecutor Rolf and his wife Sybille, who had a child with Stiller, would probably be considered atypical. Stiller professed that he loved Julika, but he abandoned her and decided that she was frigid. We only have his perspective on this. And Rolf dealt with Sybille's affair with Stiller with more sangfroid than would be considered normal!
3. It was compelling, I vacillated between believing his protestations that he was an American named White and being certain that he was Stiller, after all! The second section, written by Rolf, was also a first person narrative, so the reader only gets the male viewpoint.
4. Because I listened to an Audible version, I didn't pick up on other symbolism, so will be interested to see what there was. Maybe the house that Stiller was living in at the end? I didn't catch the name Ferme something?
5. I certainly thought of The Magic Mountain when Julika went to Davos. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are mentioned frequently, and it was interesting to know what was on Stiller's bookshelf, and the remark that looking at bookshelves does not necessarily tell you much about the owner because one doesn't know which books have been read.
4.

[Rosemary]

1. The main reason this book is so popular is not the plot, but the Big Ideas that are explored. Discuss some of these ideas.

I agree with everyone, the main one is identity, and whether we can reinvent ourselves. But apart from making up some entertaining stories about being a murderer etc, I didn't think the MC did much in the way of creating a new identity for himself - he just tried to wriggle away from the old one.

2. Another major theme is marriage and relationships, particularly between men and women. Your thoughts?

Frisch seemed to me to be saying that marriage creates a powerful, possibly indestructible, bond even when the partners are separated by physical and emotional distance. Both pairs (MC and Julika, Sybille and Rolf) come back together after the marriage seemed over. Rolf was an enigma for me - I wasn't sure if he forgave Stiller and Sybille or if he never cared about fidelity.

3. Most of the book is written in the first person, in the form of a journal or personal transcript that Stiller keeps during his imprisonment. Many have called the author’s prose brilliant, what did you think?

It seemed uneven to me, but it's hard to judge this when reading a translation.

4. Symbolism. The characters' names all have meanings. Stiller, for example, means 'the quiet one’. Discuss and/or name any symbolism you found.

The only other one I can think of is Sybille, a sibyl being a female prophet in Greek mythology (although she doesn't seem to prophesy much here). The name also makes me think of "sibilant", hissing, snake-like, but I looked it up and it's not the same in German.

5. There are also copious subtle nods to various authors and philosophers, can you name a few?

Others have named all the ones I noticed, except was there a mention of Shakespeare/Hamlet? or was that in another book I was reading at the same time... ;)

6. Some have compared this book to Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', and in fact many reviews also compare this book to works by Kafka and Camus. If you have read them what do you think?

I didn't think it was much like Kafka because the MC here is very much in control, it's just that no one falls for his stories except the credulous warder and even he is disillusioned at some point. I noticed some slips from about the halfway point where he said "I/my" instead of "he/his" for things from Stiller's past (a previous reader of the library book had marked the first of these in the margin!), so I concluded he was Stiller. This isn't like Kafka.

At some level it does share a theme with Camus' L'Etranger but I thought the style was very different, Frisch being much more long-winded.

I enjoyed it overall, although I'm not sure I completely got the point of it.

[Amanda]

1. Agree with others on identity, can you re-invent yourself, what is authenticity and what is the importance of it.

2. My thoughts on the relationships aspects of the novel seems to be in presentation they are defined by conflict and seem kind of miserable yet it seemed like the author was trying to get across some sort of 'innate importance" of these relationships...I didn't find this part of the book very moving.

3. I thought it had it's impressive moments but I've read other books that take a multi-perspective approach or use other means of complexity so this one didn't really feel that special? I would say he seems like a very skilled writer, but I wasn't blown away to the point of genius.

4. I actually am not sure why his name would mean "quiet" and be relevant. Most of the book is him trying to make himself heard- maybe that is where it is then- in the perception that his pleas are being unheard by the judicial system?

5. I didn't catch any extra ones that weren't already mentioned.

6. Definitely the ambiguity of crime and identity from Camus, the bureaucratic hell from Kafka were present in this one, so I get the comparisons.

Honestly, when I finished I still wasn't entirely sure what the "real truth" was, so props to that, but it wasn't my the most fascinating book I've read recently and felt somewhat derivative of others on the list so I gave it 3 stars.

[George P.]

Sorry I forgot to make a contribution to the discussion earlier. I finished this novel in late April.
As I made progress in reading this I was focused on whether the character really was Stiller or not. As I got nearer the end I gave up on that and just went with the flow more. I think Frisch didn't want us to "know". This gave the exploration of identity more power.

I did see some similarity to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, to Camus' novels and Sartre's Nausea, which I read last year. I haven't read much straight philosophy.
There seemed to be a great deal of digressions from the main story if in fact there is one, and I wasn't very enamored of the novel, gave it 3.5 stars in my notes.