Homo Faber

Walter Faber is a man of the modern world at its most confident: a UNESCO engineer who believes in measurement, precision, rational analysis, and the systematic application of intelligence to problems. Feeling, intuition, fate — these are not categories he finds useful. Then a series of coincidences begins. Each one is explicable. Together, they lead him to a truth about his own past that he has suppressed for twenty years — and to a catastrophe he could not have calculated or prevented.

Max Frisch’s Homo Faber is one of the essential European novels of the postwar period: a gripping story that is also a philosophical parable about the limits of the rational worldview, and about what happens to people who have trained themselves not to feel. Faber’s narration is itself a kind of performance of his character — dry, precise, increasingly cracking under the pressure of a reality that refuses to be engineered away — and Frisch’s control of that narration is masterly.

Michael Bullock’s translation makes this demanding novel fully accessible. Short, gripping, and deeply unsettling. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.