• ISBN13: 9780857429766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: General Books
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publisher Imprint: Seagull
• Publication Date: October 16, 2022
• Pages: 400
• Original Price: INR 899.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 730 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): Literary Figures

A new translation of one of the earliest volumes of Max Frisch’s innovative notebooks.Throughout his life, the great Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991) kept a series of diaries, or sketchbooks, as they came to be known in English. First published in English translation in the 1970s, these sketchbooks played a major role in establishing Frisch as, according to the New York Times, ‘the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors.’ His diaries, said the Times, ‘read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries.’ Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbook, 1946–1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count Öderland.

Max Frisch (1911-91) was one of the giants of twentieth-century German literature, achieving fame as a novelist, playwright, diarist, and essayist. He lived primarily in Switzerland. He received many German and international literature prizes, including the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Simon Pare is a translator from French and German living near Zurich.