Author's brief introduction Max Frish (19 1 1-) is a famous Swiss writer in the international literary world. People usually call him and another Swiss writer, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, "the most important German playwrights of our time". Frish was born in an architect's family in Zurich, and studied German language and literature at the University of Zurich in his early years. After his father died, he dropped out of school and started his career as a journalist, writing articles for Zurich Daily, Frankfurt Daily and Cologne Daily. 1936 received a grant from a friend and entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich to study architecture. During the Second World War, he was drafted into the army and went through difficult years. Be an architect and engage in literary creation at the same time. 1955 Become a professional writer. Max frisch is a prolific writer. He writes both novels and plays, and his works are far beyond the scope of German-speaking countries. 1976, Sulkamp Publishing House of the Federal Republic of Germany published his 12-volume complete works, and a large part of his works have been translated into many languages. It is worth mentioning that the novel The Capable Faber (1957) has been translated into as many as 24 languages, and China also published a Chinese translation in 1983. Frish's representative works are: They are Singing Again (1945), The Great Wall of China (1947), The End of War (1949) and Don Juan's Geometric Love (1953). Representative novels are: Stiehler (1954), capable Faber, I'll just use the name Gantenbein (1964), Montauk (1975) and Man Appears in a New Era (1979). Frish's plays and novels profoundly reveal the spiritual crisis of people in western society. The author himself once said: "fear, fear, fear everywhere" and "I write out of fear". His works really show people's insecurity in capitalist society, and the root of this insecurity lies in the degradation of spiritual civilization in western society. Frish appreciated Ibsen's famous saying: "I came to ask questions, not to solve problems." Therefore, it is reasonable for western literary critics to think that he is a diagnostician rather than a therapist.
The title of "capable Faber" was originally Latin, meaning "a person who thinks technology is everything". As the name implies, it is the portrayal of this typical figure in capitalist society. Walter Faber, the hero of the novel The Capable Faber, is an engineer of UNESCO. The story is told in the first person: One day, Faber flew on a business trip in la guardia airport, new york, USA. Due to the snowstorm, the plane was delayed for three hours. On the plane, Faber met a young man in Dü sseldorf, Germany, Hengkai Herbert, who went to Guatemala to visit his brother. Two people hit it off, Kan Kan laughing. Faber happened to find that this young man was the younger brother of his former friend assim Henkai. More than twenty years ago, assim was Faber's best friend in his youth and got married after breaking up. Then there was a war, he became a prisoner, and then he returned to his hometown in Dü sseldorf. Time goes by and he is old. Faber also learned that assim's wife was Hannah, Faber's young lover. Hannah comes from Munich and is half Jewish. Faber once fell in love with Hannah and they hit it off. When they were about to get married, the German Nazis began anti-Semitism and mass persecution of Jews. Hannah's father is a professor in Munich. 1933 on February 27th, the day after Hitler committed arson in parliament, Hindenburg, then president, was urged to sign the law of "protecting the people and the country" and stop implementing the seven articles in the Constitution that guaranteed people's freedom. In that horrible era, the German Nazis could arrest people at will in the name of "protective detention" according to this law, and Hannah's father, a Jew, was also included in another book and included in the ranks of "protective detention". When Faber was preparing to tie the knot with Hannah, she heard that "Hannah must leave Switzerland within 14 days ..." Faber immediately rushed to Zurich from Thun, accompanied Hannah to the Aliens Police Station, stated the reasons for her marriage, and demanded that Hannah's residence permit be restored. Although Faber is already an officer in Switzerland, it doesn't help, because "Switzerland is a small country, and there is no place to accommodate countless fugitives and give them the right of political asylum". At that time, Faber "vowed never to abandon Hannah and keep his promise" and married Hannah, and Hannah became pregnant. Even when Hannah's residence permit was revoked, Faber submitted an application to the competent authorities, advertised their marriage in the newspaper, and prepared to hold a marriage registration at the city hall. But in the reception room, Hannah left without saying goodbye. The wish to get married has not come true, perhaps because "Hannah is always very allergic, changeable, with an elusive temperament ... excited and depressed"; Maybe Hannah was worried because Faber had a German friend who asked assim out, and she "didn't want to associate with Germans". After the two broke up, more than 20 years passed, and Hannah has never been heard from. Later, I learned that Hannah and assim were married and the war broke out. "She fled to England and raised her children alone. At that time, assim was a doctor. In Russia, the mother and daughter could not afford it economically. Hannah is a German announcer of the BBC. Hannah broke up with assim and married Pipper. They met in exile. Pipper "escaped from a concentration camp, and Hannah married him without much consideration, just because of her earlier preference for * * * *." Later, Pipper "let her down because he was an opportunist, not an employee", so Hannah soon parted ways with him. In this long and bumpy life of more than 20 years, Hannah "worked in Paris, and then went to London, East Berlin and Athens. She took her children everywhere, and where there were no German schools, she taught them to do their own homework. In order to accompany her children, she also learned the piano in her forties. " On the one hand, Hannah worked hard to raise the child and put "all her heart and soul on the child"; On the other hand, she studied tirelessly and worked hard, and finally got a doctorate in philosophy. She is a strong-willed woman. After the war, assim was sent back to Germany from Russia, worked in a plantation, and later hanged himself in the virgin forest. When Faber first experienced a plane trip, he landed in Mexico because the plane broke down and stayed in the Tamopas Desert for four days and three nights before he survived. Due to the first risk, Faber went to France from new york for the second time and changed a ship. I met a young girl named Elizabeth on the boat. She is a student at Yale University. She went back to Greece to visit relatives in the summer vacation. Her mother lives in Athens and wanted to hitchhike to Italy. Faber found himself a bit like Hannah, so he became interested, as if "Hannah really appeared on the deck." After arriving in Paris, the two met unexpectedly again, perhaps by coincidence or by careful arrangement from heaven. In Paris. They visited the Louvre together, and both went to the opera house to see the play. They were inseparable and soon became inseparable friends. Later, Faber decided to accompany Elizabeth to Italy. On the way, the two fell in love. Even when Faber learned that Elizabeth was Hannah's daughter, she used mathematics to "keep silently calculating ... and always work out the desired result: she can only be a child about assim!" Soon after they returned to Greece, Elizabeth was injured by a poisonous snake slug at the seaside and was taken to the hospital for emergency treatment. Unfortunately, she passed away. Hannah heard the news when the little girl was in hospital, and so did Faber. The girl he loves is actually his own daughter. At this time, his original ideas have undergone fundamental changes. In unbearable shock, he suffered from stomach cancer, resigned from his job with regret, came to Greece, and wrote this experience in the hospital. On his deathbed, Faber no longer felt lonely, because Hannah was with him, as if "he gradually went out in the light of brooms, asphalt and the ocean, and persisted in time, that is, he faced the eternal moment." Eternity has become the past. "
Faber, the hero of the novel The Capable Faber, is an engineer. He believes that human activities are only physiological and physical reactions, and believes that mathematics can solve all problems: Elizabeth is his own daughter, and he uses the ideal date to calculate, hoping that he is not her biological father, thus achieving spiritual balance; As a master of technology, Faber "calculated by probability formula" and explained and analyzed the problems: his wife Ivy predicted her husband's short life with her palm because her lifeline was not long; Elizabeth was injured by a poisonous snake slug, and the death rate of Faber was only 3%- 10%, so I wished my daughter luck all her life. Faber is terminally ill, and he thinks the success rate of surgery can reach 94.6%. Especially in several "coincidence" and "accidental" incidents, Faber thinks that "mathematics is enough without the help of any mysticism", suggesting that technology can decide everything and any question can get a reasonable answer from it. In The Capable Faber, Frish expressed a certain inevitability in life through a series of coincidences and accidental events, just as Balzac, a French writer, said, "Chance is the greatest novelist in the world. If you want to be inexhaustible, you just need to study it. " Therefore, through a series of "coincidences" and "accidents" in the novel, readers can deeply understand the contradictory relationship between the characters: the joys and sorrows between Faber and Hannah were forced to land in Mexico on March 26, and Hannah's whereabouts were learned through the accidental acquaintance of her neighbors on the plane; Because the razor suddenly broke down, when he was about to leave the hotel, he received a phone call from the French trade union and booked a boat ticket to Europe. Otherwise, "I wouldn't have gone by boat. Anyway, I wouldn't have taken Elizabeth's boat ... I wouldn't have met my daughter in this world"; If you hadn't met Elizabeth in Paris, you wouldn't have gone to Italy and returned to Greece together; Elizabeth wouldn't be hurt by poisonous slugs, and she wouldn't go to the hospital, so Faber wouldn't see her ex-lover Hannah again. What happened here was not just an accident, but a series of accidents. The fortunes of Faber, Hannah, Elizabeth and other characters have improved, many of which are reflections of accidental events. Frish's "Coincidence is not a Book" has achieved "the pen area is full of clouds and the garden is full of twists and turns", without repetition, and each has its own characteristics. Faber in the novel is a tragic figure in that society. He is infected by the American way of life and is cynical. He lives not in a world where everything grows, but in a world full of alienation. The "technical world" became his "natural world"; His life has no marriage, no children, no obligations and even no value. Although Faber received higher education, mastered science and technology, and was smart and capable, he was spiritually empty, had no clear goal in life, and finally could not control his own destiny. Frish's description of natural scenery not only inspires and embodies feelings with scenery, but also renders the emotional appeal of the theme with scenery: the descriptions of air, sun, moon and women in the book are intertwined with the hero's fear and desire for survival: "Fire is clean, and soil is soil after the storm ... rotten soil full of germs, slippery like vaseline, and small puddles at sunrise are like dirty blood pits, menstrual blood pits and pits. That dark little head and fast twisted thin tail look like a pool, exactly the same ... it's terrible. ""The sun is still sticky as before, ... our whole body is wet with sweat, rain and greasy, as dirty as a newborn baby. " After reading this passage, if you don't use the gloomy eyes of the protagonist, if you don't appreciate the theme in the emotional appeal rendering of natural scenery, there is almost no other way. Facing the setting sun, the hero "has sunk into the green tobacco leaves" and thought that "it seems to be expanding, like a diffuse fog filled with blood bubbles, and it looks like a kidney or something else, which is annoying." Seeing the rugged rocks will be associated with "Gu Long", which makes people feel unspeakable fear. Comparing the rain to a "flood" and the figure under the moon to a "ghost" and so on, we can feel the fear that Faber can't get rid of and the sadness that permeates all the searches and can't be released. Faber's description of his last return to the Alps: "After all, it was a smooth flight. I only met a weak dry and hot wind over the Alps. I knew something about the Alps when I was young, but this is the first time to fly over it. It's a blue afternoon, a common dry and hot wind in the wind wall ... ","In the evening, the valley is oblique, the hillside is dark, the canyon is dark, and the white stream in the valley is oblique. " I hope to walk on the earth ... when the sunset shines on the last few trees, smell the rosin and listen to the sound of running water. ""I hope to touch the earth ... "Frish's successful scenery description is permeated with the hero's homesickness and complex psychological activities: trying to get rid of fear and expecting to get in touch with the earth-returning to reality, and his heart is full of longing for the future.