Fragments Against the Day of Ruin

...The diary form is easily abused...

...Would Frisch have published this miscellany of political speculation, literary reminiscences and ironic asides if he were not already a name...

...The material is too recent to be history and too old to make good journalism...

...the professor who becomes convinced he knows nothing, least of all about his specialty, and welcomes the stroke that legitimizes his incapacity...

...One wants something more than an ironic catechism of attitudes, more than yet another analysis—no matter how penetrating—of the well-fed malaise that besets all intellectuals in the face of the world's endemic nastiness and their own complaisance in it...

...Understandably, they do not want to lose the reward of their life-long cautiousness...

...The political reportage here is passe...

...Why not...

...Frisch also has some sharp comments to make about dissidence and the conformist majority: "The sum total of all yes-men, trying not to make life more difficult for themselves, produces the bogey of public opinion...

...Good, no doubt even important in their time, his accounts of the student revolt in Paris and in his native Zurich, of the inequities of income distribution in capitalist countries and the iniquities of U.S...

...Yet as Max Frisch the working journalist trudges dutifully back and forth across the border between public and private, his main concern is collecting fragments to shore against his ruin...

...It is that of an aging intellectual, positively cantankerous with the pale cast of thought, too preoccupied with conundrums that are unanswerable at any age, caught in the throes of spiritual menopause...

...No one can be expected to care, now, that Frisch lunched with Henry Kissinger at the White House two days after the invasion of Cambodia, had an abortive encounter with—probably— Nikita Khrushchev over a garden wall in Moscow, walked through Brownsville and had the appropriate thoughts, or talked with Ilya Ehren-burg at a writers' conference in Prague...

...Those who enjoy fining out questionnaires as a means to self-knowledge may be briefly entertained by the inquiries into love, death, money and the like ("Are you afraid of the poor...

...At a spa, taking the waters among trim figures and expensive tans, he fantasizes starting a "Voluntary Death Association" whose members would pledge to relieve society of their existences whenever a two-thirds vote resolved that it was time for them to go...

...the man who finds he has less and less to say until even his dog stops noticing him, and does manage to kill himself...

...For notwithstanding the atmosphere of political involvement and the harping on international developments, it is his personal ruin—its inevitability, its finality—that is the real subject of the pieces collected in this volume, not the doubtful trophies of fast-fading topical interest fetched back from his trips to Prague, to Moscow, to Paris, to New York...

...The problem is that his Sketchbook doesn't show us anything new...

...policy in Vietnam, simply do not survive...

...And anyone who has been lectured by traffic cops in Geneva will appreciate the strictures against Switzerland and the Swiss...

...But perhaps that very comment betrays a "foredoomed man...

...Throughout, Frisch is conscientious, intelligent and industrious...

...Still more depressing are the recurrent fragments of fiction about men on their way out: the aging goldsmith who cannot carry through his resolve to commit suicide and winds up in an old folk's home...

...A long-time professional, Frisch writes well in a variety of modes, but his book lacks a unifying purpose...

...Surely, the writer who 20 years ago produced the (rightly) acclaimed I'm Not Stiller would not be happy with the impression left by the Sketchbook...

...Reviewed by Kingsley Shorter This grab bag of a book spans five years of recent events: the military takeover in Greece, the Six Day War in the Mideast, the Prague Spring, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the almost-revolution in France, the first moon landing, the defeat of Kurt Kies-inger's regime in West Germany, the shootings at Kent State, hijackings by Palestinians . . . crowded years in a full life...

...Once the grovelers find themselves in the majority, they no longer need to grovel and become collectively aggressive: civic guards...

...The ruminations of the concerned intellectual that pad out the book are punctuated by "Notes for a Member's Handbook," in which the symptoms of failing powers are remorselessly documented, and the behavior characteristics of "the foredoomed man" and "the doomed man" are analyzed for what they are: stratagems to first conceal and then compensate for the long decline into decrepitude...

...Gunter Grass fans will wonder what their man.can have done to incur such odium ("His laughter is mostly at people, not with them...

...Frisch may be fortunate that his Voluntary Death Association does not exist: On the basis of this book, he might not make it past the next annual general meeting...

...Bertolt Brecht enthusiasts will be interested to read Frisch's memoir on him...

...Frisch is obsessed with aging...