Overview

"A renowned novel of self-deceit and self-acceptance.Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: ""I'm not Stiller!"" He claims that his name is Jim White, that he has been jailed under false charges and under the wrong identity. To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by ""the morbid impulse to convince,"" but no one believes him. This is a harrowing account part Kafka, part Camus of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I'm Not Stiller has come to be recognized as ""one of the major post-war works of fiction"" and a masterpiece of German literature."

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9781564784506

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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.

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

Author Information

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was born in Zurich, Switzerland before the First World War and was a soldier in the Second. In the interwar years, he traveled throughout Eastern and Central Europe as a journalist. After serving as a gunner on the Austrian and Italian borders, he followed in his father's footsteps and became an architect. These experiences helped forge the moral consciousness and the concern for human freedom that mark his writing. The author of I'm Not Stiller, Homo Faber, and The Man in the Holocene, and the winner of the Jerusalem Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize, and Neustadt International Prize for Literature among other honors, Frisch was one of Europe's most important postwar writers. Michael Bullock (1918-2008) was a British translator, poet, novelist, and the principal English translator of Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch.

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