Herr Geiser lives alone in a small mountain valley in Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. A widower in his seventies, he has trouble with his memory, often forgetting why he chose to go to another room the moment he reaches it. But he is resourceful, unscrewing a banister rail, for example, to get a pole long enough to knock down cobwebs from the ceiling, and keeping a rucksack meticulously packed in case of emergencies. He clips articles from papers or writes little notes to himself and sticks them all over his walls to remember things: Bible verses, the history of Ticino, how to draw the golden section, weather statistics, drawings of dinosaur skeletons, the times of trains he may never take, and lists of geological eras from the Precambrian to the present, the Holocene.
These scraps form a large part of Max Frisch's 1979 novella, which is entirely composed of short paragraphs and even shorter sentences. Geiser's mind travels widely but never stays on one subject for long. He describes the house and its surroundings with extraordinary accumulation of detail; he classifies sixteen different types of mountain thunder by their sounds; he thinks about his late wife; he tries to recall the names of his three daughters. The book opens in torrential rain; the valley is cut off by a landslide near the pass; Geiser is isolated in his house without electricity. But he manages. Much later, he decides to walk over into the next valley, taking precipitous paths in constant danger of being washed away. He almost makes it too, but halfway down the other side, he decides to turn back. This non-event, the only real-time happening of any magnitude in the entire book, is followed by the longest and most sustained memory, an account of a long-ago climb of the Matterhorn with his brother as a young man, bringing them both into extreme danger on the descent.
I came upon this book following up a reference in Thomas Pletzinger's recent
FUNERAL FOR A DOG
, set in much the same region, which also uses fragments and the accumulation of objective detail to explore a subjective mind-state. An even closer comparison is to the German writer W. G. Sebald (e.g.
VERTIGO
), though Frisch mostly uses scraps of printed text in place of Sebald's pictures. While Frisch's Geiser describes the outside world with accuracy and is aware, for example, of the white trails of passenger planes lacing the sky above the valley on its rare cloudless days, he is not at all concerned with Sebald's larger themes of history and national identity. Geiser knows only two kinds of time: one in which it can take an apparent lifetime for the clock to advance two minutes, and another in which millennia follow millennia in the infolding of layers of rock. Geological time, with man a mere speck at the end of it. Yet a sentient speck, isolated but still master of his destiny. I am astounded that a book built with such objectivity (we never even hear Herr Geiser's first name) should end up so personal and sympathetic. It may be the most moving picture of old age that I know.
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Dr. P. Ellis
Tour de force? No, "banality".
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2016