''Mein Name sei Gantenbein'' (roughly " etmy name be Gantenbein") is a 1964 novel by the Swiss writer

Max Frisch Max Rudolf Frisch (; 15 May 1911 – 4 April 1991) was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity (social science), identity, individuality, Moral responsibility, responsibility, morality, and political commi ...

. It was translated into English in 1965 by Michael Bullock as ''A Wilderness of Mirrors''; this translation was later reprinted under the title ''Gantenbein'' in 1982. The novel features a narrator who recounts a multitude of dislocated, fragmented stories, which together reveal certain traits and patterns.

Themes

Literature professor Michael Butler, in his essay "Identity and authenticity in postwar Swiss and Austrian novels", wrote that ''Gantenbein'' marks a different direction in Frisch's writing, as it "possesses a

postmodern Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the wo ...

playfulness" instead of "the serious irony of its predecessors". Butler wrote: "Scepticism towards the traditional claim of language to structure the world is now seen not as a threat to identity but as liberating the ego from premature restriction. The very creativity involved in constructing stories that can be on 'like clothes' is itself perceived as evidence of an authentic connection with life. ... What appeared to begin as a postmodern exercise in narrative irony turns into the acknowledgement that happiness can only be won within the confines of empirical reality."

Writing process

In a 1964 self-reflective text, Frisch explained his approach to narrative structure in ''Gantenbein''. He wrote that the aim was "to show the reality of an individual by having him appear as a blank patch outlined by the sum of fictional entities congruent with his personality. ... The story is not told as if an individual could be identified by his factual behaviour; let him betray himself in his fictions."

References

1964 novels German-language novels Novels by Max Frisch Swiss speculative fiction novels Suhrkamp Verlag books 20th-century Swiss novels {{1960s-specf-novel-stub

Themes

Writing process

See also

References