I'm Not Stiller

by Max Frisch

Overview

The unabridged version of a haunting story of a man in prison. His wife, brother, and mistress recognize him and call him by his name, Anatol Ludwig Stiller. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting that he’s not Stiller. Could he possibly be right-or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one? Translated by Michael Bullock. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156849906
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/13/1994
Series:	Harvest Book Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Max Frisch, born in Zurich in 1911, was one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, achieving fame as a novelist, playwright, diarist, and essayist. He died in 1991, the year Homo Faber was made by Volker Schlondorff into the acclaimed motion picture Voyager, starring Sam Shepard.

Editorial Reviews

It exudes postwar high seriousness: it cannot wait to show off its many layers of meaning. . . . Then comes the voice of Stiller himself: treacherous, evasive and compelling as an Edgar Allan Poe murderer or a Raymond Chandler detective. . . . When the curtain comes down one last time on the life of Anatol Ludwig Stiller, it is truly harrowing: it is a spiritual blackout.

New York Times

Readers cannot but feel the force of what remains one of the most important novels of the post-war years.

Times Literary Supplement

A single consciousness contains multitudes: in fathoming it, Frisch evokes the complex reality of a dangerous and enthralling world.

New Statesman

Mr. Frisch is not really a novelist of ideas; he's a dramatist of ideas. We live out our ideas through our daily lives, after all, and he grasps every nuance of those daily habits and compulsions. It is the tension between these details and the larger ambitions -- so grandly imagined, so absurdly lived out -- that makes the "I'm Not Stiller" work. -- New York Times

Margo Jefferson

Described by the publisher as "part Kafka, part Camus," this 1954 novel is the story of an imprisoned man who claims to be another. To prove that he is Jim White, and not Stiller, he provides details on three unsolved murders and his life on the outside.

—Michael Rogers

Library Journal

"Frisch is a great, and even an inspiring, writer, because he gives us the unique sense that the act of analysis is a passionate act, impelled by our fear of the world's dissolution and our knowledge of our own fragility." —Newsday 

"We live out our ideas through our daily lives, after all, and [Frisch] grasps every nuance of those daily habits and compulsions. It is the tension between these details and the larger ambitions — so grandly imagined, so absurdly lived out — that makes the novel work." —New York Times

From the Publisher