What was Max Rudolf Frisch's first novel?
Jürg Reinhart
Jürg Reinhart. Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt (""Jürg Reinhart. A fateful summer journey"") is the first novel of the Swiss writer Max Frisch (1911-1991). It was started during the winter of 1933 and published in Germany by in 1934. Frisch would later distance himself from this juvenile autobiographical work which was not reprinted as an individual novel, although much later it was included in a compilation of Frisch's collected works. His second novel, , referred back to this first novel, being again centred on the same eponymous protagonist.
Max Frisch
Frisch himself took the view that the diary offered the prose format that corresponded with his natural approach to prose writing, something that he could "no more change than the shape of his nose". Attempts were nevertheless made by others to justify Frisch's choice of prose format. Frisch's friend and fellow-writer, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, explained that in "I'm Not Stiller" the "diary-narrative" approach enabled the author to participate as a character in his own novel without embarrassment. (The play focuses on the question of identity, which is a recurring theme in the work of Frisch.) More specifically, in the character of James Larkin White, the American who in reality is indistinguishable from Stiller himself, but who nevertheless vigorously denies being the same man, embodies the author, who in his work cannot fail to identify the character as himself, but is nevertheless required by the literary requirements of the narrative to conceal the fact. Rolf Keiser points out that the diary format enables Frisch most forcefully to demonstrate his familiar theme that thoughts are always based on one specific standpoint and its context; and that it can never be possible to present a comprehensive view of the world, nor even to define a single life, using language alone.